Search code examples
ruby-on-railspdfpdf-generationruby-on-rails-4wkhtmltopdf

generating pdf hangs on rails 4 using PDFkit gem

I'm able to download pdf file with:

curl google.com | wkhtmltopdf - test.pdf

so it means, wkhtmlpdf installation was successful.

But, when I try to generate pdf file by accessing http://localhost:3000/contacts/1.pdf it hangs. In the status bar it shows: Waiting for localhost...

Rails server output:

Started GET "/contacts/1.pdf" for 127.0.0.1 at 2013-07-28 21:45:06 +0900
  ActiveRecord::SchemaMigration Load (0.1ms)  SELECT "schema_migrations".* FROM "schema_migrations"
Processing by ContactsController#show as HTML
  Parameters: {"id"=>"1"}
  Contact Load (0.3ms)  SELECT "contacts".* FROM "contacts" WHERE "contacts"."id" = ? LIMIT 1  [["id", "1"]]
  Rendered contacts/show.html.erb within layouts/application (1.4ms)
Completed 200 OK in 99ms (Views: 57.0ms | ActiveRecord: 0.7ms)

Gemfile:

gem 'pdfkit'

application.rb:

config.middleware.use "PDFKit::Middleware"

According to the PDFKit railscast this should be enough for generating pdf files just by adding .pdf ...

UPDATE:

show.html.erb:

<p id="notice"><%= notice %></p>

<p>
  <strong>Name:</strong>
  <%= @contact.name %>
</p>

<p>
  <strong>Age:</strong>
  <%= @contact.age %>
</p>

<%= link_to 'Edit', edit_contact_path(@contact) %> |
<%= link_to 'Back', contacts_path %>

layouts/application.html.erb:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <title>Pdftest</title>
  <%= stylesheet_link_tag    "application", media: "all", "data-turbolinks-track" => true %>
  <%= javascript_include_tag "application", "data-turbolinks-track" => true %>
  <%= csrf_meta_tags %>
</head>
<body>

<%= yield %>

</body>
</html>

UPDATE 2:

Thanks to @Arman H for helping me to figure out that I have to specify absolute path for assets instead of a relative ones. When I removed the following lines I was able to generate PDF file:

<%= stylesheet_link_tag    "application", media: "all", "data-turbolinks-track" => true %>
<%= javascript_include_tag "application", "data-turbolinks-track" => true %>

Now, I can't get how to substitute this with an absolute paths. It seems this post is what I need, but I still can't figure out how this would look like for my case.

Solution

  • The issue was due to stylesheet_link_tag and javascript_include_tag using relative URLs, which often causes wkhtmltopdf to hang when loading assets from the same server that wkhtmltopdf is running on.

    Using absolute URLs for assets solved the problem.

    Set asset_host in Rails' config, which also affects stylesheet_link_tag and javascript_include_tag:

    # Modify asset host config setting in `config/application.rb`
# Or create a new initializer: `config/initializers/wkhtmltopdf.rb`
config.action_controller.asset_host = "http://mysite.com"

# Or you can have different hosts for development (local) and production (CDN):
# In `config/environments/development.rb`
config.action_controller.asset_host = "http://localhost"
# In `config/environments/production.rb`
config.action_controller.asset_host = "http://d111111abcdef8.cloudfront.net"