Ubuntu WKHTMLTOPDF and rvm

For whatever reason, in Ubuntu LTS 64-bit wkhtmltopdf wouldn't install using

   pdfkit --install-wkhtmltopdf

It just came over as a lzma file. It would appear in my 'path' so it appeared to be a working executable.... but that wasn't the case.

I am using RVM and adopted the user policy that EVERYTHING should be self contained in ~/ or that user's home directory.

Solution

I removed all instances of the existing wkhtmltopdf in /usr/local/bin

   sudo rm /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf

I then used wget to get the latest wkhtmltopdf for a 64 bit system and then uncompressed and untar'd the thing in an rvm gem directory. I probably should have put it somewhere else, but this will do for now.

   cd /home/pjammer/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p249/bin/
   wget http://wkhtmltopdf.googlecode.com/files/wkhtmltopdf-0.10.0_beta5-static-amd64.tar.lzma
   lzma -d wkhtmltopdf-0.10.0_beta5-static-amd64.tar.lzma
   tar -xf wkhtmltopdf-0.10.0_beta5-static-amd64.tar
   rm wkhtmltopdf-0.10.0_beta5-static-amd64.tar
   mv wkhtmltopdf-amd64 wkhtmltopdf

I then restarted my app for good measure.

Lastly, make sure you change your production.rb environment file (2.3.5 here, the good rails version :-) to something like:

config.middleware.use PDFKit::Middleware, :print_media_type => true, :wkhtmltopdf => '/home/pjammer/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p249/bin/wkhtmltopdf'