npm package discovery and stats viewer.

Discover Tips

  • General search

    [free text search, go nuts!]

  • Package details

    pkg:[package-name]

  • User packages

    @[username]

Sponsor

Optimize Toolset

I’ve always been into building performant and accessible sites, but lately I’ve been taking it extremely seriously. So much so that I’ve been building a tool to help me optimize and monitor the sites that I build to make sure that I’m making an attempt to offer the best experience to those who visit them. If you’re into performant, accessible and SEO friendly sites, you might like it too! You can check it out at Optimize Toolset.

About

Hi, 👋, I’m Ryan Hefner  and I built this site for me, and you! The goal of this site was to provide an easy way for me to check the stats on my npm packages, both for prioritizing issues and updates, and to give me a little kick in the pants to keep up on stuff.

As I was building it, I realized that I was actually using the tool to build the tool, and figured I might as well put this out there and hopefully others will find it to be a fast and useful way to search and browse npm packages as I have.

If you’re interested in other things I’m working on, follow me on Twitter or check out the open source projects I’ve been publishing on GitHub.

I am also working on a Twitter bot for this site to tweet the most popular, newest, random packages from npm. Please follow that account now and it will start sending out packages soon–ish.

Open Software & Tools

This site wouldn’t be possible without the immense generosity and tireless efforts from the people who make contributions to the world and share their work via open source initiatives. Thank you 🙏

© 2024 – Pkg Stats / Ryan Hefner

@ministryofjustice/express-template-to-pdf

v2.1.0

Published

Generates PDF from templates in Express routes

Downloads

6,161

Readme

express-template-to-pdf

NPM Version Licence Build Issues Download

Serve PDF documents in express generated from templates

Installation

npm install @ministryofjustice/express-template-to-pdf --save

Usage

Specify the location of your views directory

const pdfRenderer = require('@ministryofjustice/express-template-to-pdf')

app.set('views', path.join(__dirname, 'views'))
app.set('view engine', 'pug')

app.use(pdfRenderer())

Render a PDF from a template by specifying a template name and passing the data. In this example, the template views/helloWorld.pug will be used

app.use('/pdf', (req, res) => {
    res.renderPDF('helloWorld', { message: 'Hello World!' });
})

Configuring Puppeteer

Puppeteer launch options (including Chromium flags via the args array) can be passed to the pdfRenderer function and used on every render. If no options are specified the default options below will be used.

Note: The default puppeteer launch options pass flags to disable the Chrome sandbox

This is one way to enable running Puppeteer in Docker but may be a security issue if you are loading untrusted content, in which case you should override these defaults. See Puppeteer troubleshooting for further info on the use of --no-sandbox

Default options:

{ args: ['--no-sandbox', '--disable-setuid-sandbox'] }

Pass options to the pdfRenderer function to replace the defaults. Pass an empty object if you only want to remove the defaults.

For example, to remove the above defaults and change the default Puppeteer timeout, you could pass options like this. See Puppeteer launch options for more info.

app.use(pdfRenderer( { timeout:60000 } ))

Customising the output

To set the filename for the PDF when downloaded, pass the options object. The default filename is document.pdf

app.use('/pdf', (req, res) => {
    res.renderPDF('helloWorld', { message: 'Hello World!' }, { filename: 'helloWorld.pdf' });
})

To customise the PDF document, pass additional pdfOptions. The PDF creation uses https://www.npmjs.com/package/puppeteer. pdfOptions are passed through to Puppeteer. See the Puppeteer page.pdf options

const options = {
  filename: 'helloWorld.pdf',
  pdfOptions: {
    format: 'A4',
    margin: {
      top: '40px',
      bottom: '20px',
      left: '40px',
      right: '20px',
    },
  },
}

app.use('/pdf', (req, res) => {
    res.renderPDF('helloWorld', { message: 'Hello World!' }, options);
})

Using Puppeteer and headless chrome in Docker

The bundled Chromium used by Puppeteer does not have the necessary shared libraries. Running in Docker will require installing the missing dependencies in your dockerfile. See Puppeteer troubleshooting

eg at minimum you will need this in your dockerfile:

# Install latest chrome dev package libs so that the bundled version of Chromium installed by Puppeteer will work
# https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/blob/master/docs/troubleshooting.md#running-puppeteer-in-docker
RUN wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | apt-key add - \
    && sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google.list' \
    && apt-get update \
    && apt-get install -y google-chrome-unstable ttf-freefont \
      --no-install-recommends \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

Note also that there are difficulties with the Chrome sandbox. If running as the root user, you must use the --no-sandbox option. The sandbox may also be missing from Linux environments. If you trust the html content you are opening, as is likely to be the case if you are rendering your own templates and not accessing external sites or loading user-submitted content, then you can use the --no-sandbox option. See Puppeteer troubleshooting

How it works

express-template-to-pdf renders your existing templates to formatted html. Then it passes the HTML to puppeteer to generate the PDF. The PDF is returned in the response as binary data with content type application/pdf

CSS

Puppeteer needs to be able to see any stylesheets linked in your template. This means using an absolute url

doctype html
html(lang="en")
  head
    link(href= "http://domain/path/styles.css", media="print", rel="stylesheet", type="text/css")

  body

    block content

      div
        h1.myStyle
            A styled Heading

Or set the host (and port in dev environments) dynamically from environment config

link(href= "#{domain}/path/styles.css", media="print", rel="stylesheet", type="text/css")

Note that Puppeteer will use "print" media CSS rules when rendering PDF. You can use @page CSS rules by setting the preferCSSPageSize option, otherwise use the Puppeteer format and margin options.

Page breaks

Page breaks can be controlled using css, for example to avoid breaking inside a block or to force a break after, you could use:

.no-break {
    page-break-inside: avoid;
}
.pagebreak {
  page-break-before: always;
}

Headers and footers

You can create repeating headers and footers on each page using the Pupeteer page.pdf options headerTemplate and footerTemplate.

Note that the headers and footers can not see external stylesheets and must use inline styles.

Also note that the headers and footers will not be visible unless you set page margins to ensure that page content does not sit over them.

Puppeteer exposes page numbering classes. See the Puppeteer page.pdf options

In this example, the header and footer blocks are given a height of 20px, and the top and bottom margins are made bigger than that.

const headerFooterStyle =
  'font-family: Arial; font-size: 10px; font-weight: bold; width: 100%; height: 20px; text-align: center;'
  
const options = {
  filename: 'helloWorld.pdf',
  pdfOptions: {
    displayHeaderFooter: true,
    headerTemplate: `<span style="${headerFooterStyle}">Repeating header on every page</span>`,
    footerTemplate: `<span style="${headerFooterStyle}">Repeating footer on page <span class="pageNumber"></span> of <span class="totalPages"></span></span>`,      
    format: 'A4',
    margin: {
      top: '40px',
      bottom: '60px',
      left: '40px',
      right: '20px',
    },
  },
}

Example

run node examples/pug/index.js or node examples/nunjucks/index.js then browse to http://localhost:3001/pdf

License

MIT


Authors: Alistair Todd, Steven Bapaga