PDF API Web Server

PDF Generation Web Served made on top of PahntomJS (http://phantomjs.org/). PhantomJS is a headless WebKit scriptable with a JavaScript API. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG.

Requirements

• PhantomJS
• Nginx

pdfapi accepts POST HTTP requests with HTML content and renders PDF document out of it. Only the follwoing Content Types are supported:

• text/plain
• text/html
• application/json

Any other Content Type will be rejected by pdfapi web server.

Page Formatting

application/json was added to support more complex configuration, such like custom headers and footers. When you post HTTP request, please make sure that the following JSON message is sent to pdfapi REST API:

    {
      content: 'your HTML content goes here',
      pageSize: 'A4',
      orientation: 'portrait',
      margin: {left: '2.5cm', right: '2.5cm', top: '2.5cm', bottom: '1cm'},
      header: {height: '0.9cm', content: ''},
      footer: {height: '0.9cm', content: '<div style="text-align:center;"><small>%%pageNumber/%%totalPages</small></div>'}
    }

Notice %%pageNumber/%%totalPages. You can use %%pageNumber and/or %%totalPages anywhere in the header or the footer content area and pdfapi will turn them into numbers during the PDF rendering.

When text/plain or text/html Content Type is used, HTTP POST request body will be used as is considering that whole content is HTML to be rendered and default page formattting will be use (exactly as stated on JSON example above).

Serving generated PDFs back to user

To simplify PDF document serving and unload HTTP traffic from PDF Generator web server we simply redirect all /get/filename calls to NGINX and for that we added the following rule:

location /get 
        {
                 alias /home/sites/_path_to_folder_with_pdfs/temp_files;
        }

Removing old generated files

In our case we need generated PDFs for a period like 10 minutes, after that we can safely remove them. This can be done via cron with this simple instruction:

*/10 * * * * find /home/sites/_path_to_folder_with_pdfs/temp_files/ -mmin +10 -exec rm {} \;

REST API

API documentation and details on REST API can be found on http://docs.pdfapi.apiary.io/