Create PDF API

A simple REST API endpoint to create PDF files from HTML or Markdown templates, and store them in a Google Cloud Storage bucket.

Uses Puppeteer to generate the PDF files, Marked to convert Markdown to HTML, and Handlebars to render templates. Uses Google Cloud Storage to store the generated PDF files.

Getting started

Create a .env file with:

• BUCKET_NAME: The name of the Google Cloud Storage bucket where to store the generated PDF files.
• GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS (optional): The path to your Google credentials. The account must have the permission to write to the bucket above.

Install libraries, build the project and start the webapp:

npm install
npm run build
npm run start

Build the Docker image:

docker build --no-cache --progress=plain --pull -t create-pdf-api .

Start a Docker container:

docker run -d -p 3000:3000 create-pdf-api

The webapp is stateless which makes it easy to deploy in a serverless environment (e.g. Google Cloud Run, etc.). This means the API will incur costs only when it is used at a certain scale.

API

Simple request to generate and store a PDF file:

curl -X POST http://localhost:3000/ \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "markdown": "# Hello world",
   }'

The response will contain the URL of the generated PDF file in the Google Cloud Storage bucket.

{
  "id": "<FILE_ID>",
  "url": "https://storage.googleapis.com/<BUCKET_NAME>/<FILE_ID>.pdf"
}

List of parameters (either markdown or html is required):

• markdown: The markdown content to convert to PDF. (optional)
• html: The HTML content to convert to PDF. (optional)
• useHandlebars: If set to true, the HTML or Markdown content will be processed as a Handlebars template. (optional)
• context: The context to use for the Handlebars template. (optional)
• css: Override the default CSS styles to apply to the HTML. (optional)
• markedOptions: The options to pass to the marked library when converting Markdown to HTML. (optional). See marked documentation.
• pdfOptions: The options to pass to the puppeteer library when generating the PDF. (optional). See puppeteer documentation.

Rendering a Handlebars template

To render a Handlebars template, set the useHandlebars parameter to true and provide the context parameter with the data to use for rendering.

curl -X POST http://localhost:3000/ \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "markdown": "# {{title}}\n\n{{content}}",
    "useHandlebars": true,
    "context": {
      "title": "Hello world",
      "content": "This is a test"
    }
  }'