node-wkhtmltopdf

A Node.js wrapper for the wkhtmltopdf command line tool. As the name implies, it converts HTML documents to PDFs using WebKit.

Installation

First, you need to install the wkhtmltopdf command line tool on your system.

The easiest way to do this is to download a prebuilt version for your system. DO NOT try to use the packages provided by your distribution as they may not be using a patched Qt and have missing features.

Finally, to install the node module, use npm:

npm install wkhtmltopdf

Be sure the wkhtmltopdf command line tool is in your PATH when you're done installing. If you don't want to do this for some reason, you can change the require('wkhtmltopdf').command property to the path to the wkhtmltopdf command line tool.

Usage

wkhtmltopdf(source, [options], [callback]);

var wkhtmltopdf = require('wkhtmltopdf');

// URL
wkhtmltopdf('http://google.com/', { pageSize: 'letter' })
  .pipe(fs.createWriteStream('out.pdf'));
  
// HTML
wkhtmltopdf('<h1>Test</h1><p>Hello world</p>')
  .pipe(res);

// Stream input and output
var stream = wkhtmltopdf(fs.createReadStream('file.html'));

// output to a file directly
wkhtmltopdf('http://apple.com/', { output: 'out.pdf' });

// Optional callback
wkhtmltopdf('http://google.com/', { pageSize: 'letter' }, function (err, stream) {
  // do whatever with the stream
});

// Repeatable options
wkhtmltopdf('http://google.com/', {
  allow : ['path1', 'path2'],
  customHeader : [
    ['name1', 'value1'],
    ['name2', 'value2']
  ]
});

// Ignore warning strings
wkhtmltopdf('http://apple.com/', { 
  output: 'out.pdf',
  ignore: ['QFont::setPixelSize: Pixel size <= 0 (0)']
});
// RegExp also acceptable
wkhtmltopdf('http://apple.com/', { 
  output: 'out.pdf',
  ignore: [/QFont::setPixelSize/]
});

wkhtmltopdf is just a function, which you call with either a URL or an inline HTML string, and it returns a stream that you can read from or pipe to wherever you like (e.g. a file, or an HTTP response).

Options

There are many options available to wkhtmltopdf. All of the command line options are supported as documented on the page linked to above. The options are camelCased instead-of-dashed as in the command line tool. Note that options that do not have values, must be specified as a boolean, e.g. debugJavascript: true

There is also an output option that can be used to write the output directly to a filename, instead of returning a stream.

Debug Options

Apart from the debugJavascript option from wkhtmltopdf, there is an additional options debug and debugStdOut which will help you debug rendering issues, by outputting data to the console. debug prints and stderr messages while debugStdOut prints any stdout warning messages.

Tests

Run npm test and manually check that generated files are like the expected files. The test suit prints the paths of the files that needs to be compared.

TODO - Find a way to automatically compare the PDF files.

License

MIT