django-selenium-pdfmaker

A Light Django Application which uses selenium to convert html pages to pdf. Using this approach you can easily convert any HTML page with charts, tables and ... to PDF.

Install

Install easily via pip:

pip install django-selenium-pdfmaker

Then add package name django_selenium_pdfmaker to the INSTALLED_APPS of django.

Installation of Google-Chrome & chromedriver

To use this package, google-chrome and proper chromedriver should be installed on your Operating System.

To install google chrome:

sudo curl -sS -o - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | sudo apt-key add 
sudo bash -c "echo 'deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list" 
sudo apt -y update 
sudo apt -y install google-chrome-stable 

And to have latest chromedriver A python management command is developed:

./manage.py pdfmaker_install_chromedriver

Usage

To use this module, try to create an instance of PDFMaker class, then call get_pdf_from_html method.

from django_selenium_pdfmaker.modules import PDFMaker
pdfmaker = PDFMaker()
res = pdfmaker.get_pdf_from_html(url='https://google.com', filename='output', write=True)

Which will load url in chromedriver and return proper results in res json. which includes:

{
  "status": true,
  "raw": "pdf in binary format",
  "pdf": "ConvertedPDF instance if write flag is True.",
  "message": ""
}

• status is true when converting to pdf is successful, else will be false. For example when url path is unreachable status will be false.
• raw is binary data of pdf before storing in file. Will hold data if status == true
• pdf is ConvertedPDF object if status is true.
• message will hold reason why status is false.

Settings

CHROMEDRIVER_PATH='/usr/bin/chromedriver'

Override this variable to address the binary file of chromedriver of your own. Optional.

SELENIUM_DELAY=0

To set delay on selenium requests (Default 0). This option is usefull for websites having javascripts, lazy loading and features which need to be loaded on the website. By setting this value, you will tell selenium after fetching website content, wait for SELENIUM_DELAY seconds, till website is fully loaded.

Exceptions

1- Message: session not created: This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version 90 Current browser version is 103.0.5060.53 with binary path /usr/bin/google-chrome

If you faced a problem like this, you should address the correct chromedriver binary in your codes. To do that download the proper chromedriver version and place in your OS. Then address it with following option in your settings.py file:

CHROMEDRIVER_PATH = '/usr/bin/chromedriver'

Also you can use below script to automatically fix this problem:

./manage.py pdfmaker_install_chromedriver

Link