Pod is a back-end application that provides an API for HTML to PDF conversion.
We intend to create a platform for PDF files creation that makes it feasible for small companies to include PDF generation in its applications.
The commercial solutions available today are very expensive and prevents cost-effective solutions to include PDFs as one of its features.
This is an application that needs to be hosted in a server where you have full access, since you will need to install Xvfb.
Here is a blog post about how to install Pod as a HTML to PDF provider How to create your own HTML to PDF provider
In order to have the proper environment set, you need to install Xvfb, which allows us to run wkhtmltopdf within a X server instance. To do that, type:
sudo apt-get install xvfb
You also need to install the libssl-0.9.8 library, what allows Qt to fetch SSL sites. That might be the case if the HTML you're trying to render have assets (such as CSS or JS) hosted in https websites.
sudo apt-get install libssl-0.9.8
You also need to have a proper enviroment to run a Ruby on Rails application. I followed this RailsCast provided by Ryan Bates. It's a pro feature, so you need to subscribe it to get access. If you're a Ruby/Rails programmer, I really recommend you to do so.
If all that set, you just need to get the application in your machine, and deploy it to your server.
git clone git@github.com:jdanielnd/pod
cd pod
cap deploy:setup
cap deploy:cold
After you have your pod instance successfully running, you can request PDF files bu using its public API.
wget http://<youserveraddress.com>/convert?filename=test&html=<h3>Blabla</h3>
There is a gem called pod_rails that integrates it to your Rails application.
If you'd like to contribute to Pod, follow the steps below:
- Fork it
- Create your feature branch (
git checkout -b my-new-feature) - Commit your changes (
git commit -am 'Add some feature') - Push to the branch (
git push origin my-new-feature) - Create new Pull Request
We really need people to help us improving Pod!
Pod is MIT Licensed and © Tecto ID. See LICENSE for details.