Rails 3 - wkhtmltopdf command failed when using PDFKit to create PDF documents

Question

I have setup PDFKit in my Rails 3 application, using RVM (had to manually copy the wkhtmltopdf binary). When I try to render the PDF version of a page, I get this error:

RuntimeError in AgenciesController#show

command failed: ["lib/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf", "--disable-smart-shrinking", "--page-size", "Letter", "--margin-top", "0.75in", "--margin-right", "0.75in", "--margin-bottom", "0.75in", "--margin-left", "0.75in", "--encoding", "UTF-8", "--quiet", "\n.......\n", "-"]

The following is in my applicaition.rb:

    config.middleware.use "PDFKit::Middleware"
    PDFKit.configure do |config|
    config.wkhtmltopdf = 'lib/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf' 

    end

An ideas why this is happening? how can I fix it?

In the console, I noticed this message:

 (sometimes it will work just to ignore this error with --ignore-load-errors)

Where do I invoke that switch? wkhtmltopdf seems to be working fine on the command line, I can do something like "./wkhtmltopdf http://www.google.com google.pdf" and generate a PDF.

Thanks for your help,

Peter

Answer 1

Judging from the source code, you can set options on pdfkit. I think the following will work:

PDFKit.configure do |config|
  config.default_options[:ignore_load_errors] = true
end

(I didn't test it though)

Answer 2

I searched it on google, and found the answer on a blog.

Solution is here:

Installing dependencies

$sudo aptitude install openssl build-essential xorg libssl-dev

For 64bits OS Run one by one following commands:

$ sudo wget http://wkhtmltopdf.googlecode.com/files/wkhtmltopdf-0.9.9-static-amd64.tar.bz2
$ sudo tar xvjf wkhtmltopdf-0.9.9-static-amd64.tar.bz2
$ sudo mv wkhtmltopdf-amd64 /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf 
$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf

Finally, go to your rails app/config/initializer folder and create new file pdfkit.rb and paste the following code into it:

PDFKit.configure do |config|
   config.wkhtmltopdf = '/usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf' if Rails.env.production?
end

That's it. Now your pdf file will be downloaded. Also visit for further information: http://www.stormconsultancy.co.uk/blog/development/generating-pdfs-in-rails-with-pdfkit-and-deploying-to-a-server/

Thanks.