Nightmare.js does not work with Azure webjob

Question

I am trying to run an azure webjob which takes a json object and renders a webpage, then prints it to pdf, via the electron browser in Nightmare.js.

When I run this locally it works perfectly, but when I run it in azure webjob it never completes.
I get the two console.log statements output to the log, but seeing as I can not output anything from the nightmare.js calls, nor display the electron browser window, I have no idea what is going wrong.

There is also a webserver in the script, omitted as it seems to take the request with the json object and pass it to createPage just fine.

I have verified that index.html file is in the right directory. Does anyone know what might be wrong?

var Nightmare = require('nightmare'),
    http = require('http');

function createPage(o, final) {

    var start = new Date().getTime();
    var page = Nightmare({
        //show: true, //uncomment to show electron browser window
        //openDevTools: { mode: 'detach'}, //uncomment to open developer console ('show: true' needs to be set)
        gotoTimeout: 300000, //set timeout for .goto() to 2 minutes
        waitTimeout: 300000, //set timeout for .wait() to 5 minutes
        executionTimeout: 600000 //set timeout for .evaluate() to 10 minutes
    })
    .goto('file:\\\\' + __dirname + '\\index.html');

    page.wait("#ext-quicktips-tip") //wait till HTML is loaded
    .wait(function () { // wait till JS is loaded
        console.log('Extjs loaded.');
        return !!(Ext.isReady && window.App && App.app);
    });

    console.log("CreatePage()1");

    page.evaluate(function (template, form, lists, printOptions) {
        App.pdf.Builder.create({
            template: template,
            form: form,
            lists: lists,
            format: o.printOptions.format,
        });
        console.log('Create done');
    }, template, form, o.lists, printOptions);

    console.log("CreatePage()2");
    page.wait(function () {
        console.log('Content created. ' + App.pdf.Builder.ready);
        return App.pdf.Builder.ready;
    })
    .pdf(o.outputDir + form.filename, { "pageSize": "A4", "marginsType": 1 })
    .end()
    .then(function () {
        console.log('Pdf printed, time: ' + (new Date().getTime() - start) / 1000 + ' seconds');
        final(true);
    })
    .catch(function (err) {
        console.log('Print Error: ' + err.message);
    });
}

Solved

As Rick states in his answer, this will not currently work! This document lists the current state of webjobs sandbox:
https://github.com/projectkudu/kudu/wiki/Azure-Web-App-sandbox
It has the following paragraph relating to my issue:

PDF generation from HTML

There are multiple libraries used to convert HTML to PDF. Many Windows/.NET specific versions leverage IE APIs and therefore leverage User32/GDI32 extensively. These APIs are largely blocked in the sandbox (regardless of plan) and therefore these frameworks do not work in the sandbox.

There are some frameworks that do not leverage User32/GDI32 extensively (wkhtmltopdf, for example) and we are working on enabling these in Basic+ the same way we enabled SQL Reporting.

Answer 1

I guess for nightmare.js to work you need desktop interaction, which you're not getting on a WebJob.

Taken from this issue on Github:

Nightmare isn't truly headless: it requires an Electron instance to work, which in turn requires a framebuffer to render properly (at least, for now).

This will not fly on an Azure WebJob.