I'm trying to use pdfkit to turn html pages into PDFs, and then return a stream of that PDF as this code is a Flask API called by a webpage.
As far as I can tell, when you use pdfkit.from_file, you have provide both an input and output path:
pdfkit.from_file("input.html", "output.pdf")
The problem is, I don't want to write these files to my server, as there could be hundreds of users generating these PDFs. Is there any option to return that as a stream instead? This comment suggests there is, but I couldn't get it to work: https://stackoverflow.com/a/73821712/4339010
If there is no stream option, what the best alternative? Write the file temporarily with a uuid or some transactional id I do have, write that to a stream and then delete the pdf and return the stream? Just looking for some options. Thanks.
Upgrading to 1.0.0 of pdfkit solved my problem. At that point, the output file is an optional parameter. If you are on an earlier version like I was (0.6.1), if you just provided False instead of a file, it will work the same as 1.0.0.
Regardless of your version, when you call it as above the file is returned as a string. You can take that and send that back in your webservice without having to save anything.
file_str = pdfkit.from_file("hello.html")
return Response(file_str, mimetype="application/pdf", headers={"Content-Disposition": "attachment; filename=hello.pdf"})