PDF Generation Server with Puppeteer

• Author: Fred Neumann
• Status: experimental

This is a simple node.js script to create a PDF from HTML using Puppeteer.

Installation

First install puppeteer:

npm install puppeteer

Then clone this repository to the directory in which you installed puppeteer.

Start

To run the service go the cloned directory an execute:

node service.js

It should show you this message:

Server running on port 3000

You should put this service behind a reverse proxy to call it with https from outside.

Usage

The service is called with a POST request and returns the generated PDF as inline content. The POST must be delivered as content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded.

POST Field	Content
html	The HTML content to be rendered
format	e.g. 'A4'
landscape	'0' or '1'
headerTemplate	html code of the template for the header
footerTemplate	html code of the template for the footer

see https://pptr.dev/api/puppeteer.pdfoptions for details.

Acknowledgements

The implementation adapts examples from:

• https://apitemplate.io/blog/tips-for-generating-pdfs-with-puppeteer/
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4295782/how-to-process-post-data-in-node-js