PDFtk

PDFtk Server is a command-line tool for working with PDFs.

This project shows how to compile and deploy the pdftk binary as an AWS Lambda Layer, as well as a built version for the binaries ready to use.

Currently the included binaries under bin and lib were built for the PDFtk 2.02 version.

AWS Lambda Layer

Lambda Layers is a new convenient way to manage common dependencies between different Lambda Functions.

The following command will create a well-structured layer of this package:

git clone https://github.com/inetsys/pdftk-aws-lambda.git
cd pdftk-aws-lambda
make

The resulting ZIP file pdftk-aws-lambda.zip can be uploaded to the AWS Lambda Layers console.

Build binary

In order to compile the pdftk binary, the following steps were followed:

1. Start an EC2 instance with CentOS 6. Amazon Linux is not suitable as it has not the gcj compiler (see AWS Forum post)
2. Install some devtools, download the PDFtk source and build the binaries

sudo yum update -y
sudo yum install gcc gcc-java libgcj libgcj-devel gcc-c++ wget unzip
curl -SsLO https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/pdftk-2.02-src.zip
unzip pdftk-2.02-src.zip
cd pdftk-2.02-dist/pdftk
make -f Makefile.Redhat
sudo make -f Makefile.Redhat install

This process outputs two files:

1. The main binary file is located at /usr/local/bin/pdftk
2. A shared library at /usr/lib64/libgcj.so.10 that must be copied at some location defined in the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH

According to AWS Documentation, there are two paths exported as environment variables directly related to AWS Lambda Layers (as they unzip under /opt)

• LD_LIBRARY_PATH includes /opt/lib
• PATH includes /opt/bin

The ZIP file resulting from executing make in this package will store both binary files under the corresponding directories, so it is ready to use system wide.

Usage

The Layer is independent from the Lambda Function Runtime, so it should be available for any of them.