django-wkhtmltopdf on a linux (Webfaction) server

Loïs Di Qual — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 13:10:08 +0000

Generating PDF with python is not an easy thing. Here is what I’ve tried:

xhtml2pdf: the worst. It has a very bad CSS interpreter and it is pretty impossible to make a clean PDF out from a complex html page.
WeasyPrint: that’s better. It has its own HTML and CSS2 interpreters, and despite some minor issues it is fairly reliable. However it requires some big dependencies, and I eventually had some memory issues on my webserver.
wkhtmltopdf with its Django wrapper: for now, the best. It makes use of Webkit to render HTML+CSS+JS(!) pages, I don’t think you can do better. However, it requires QT, and this is big. Well, not the “classical” QT, a patched QT (that’s even worse) that allows to run without an X server. This is what I’m using for now in my projects

We’ll see here how to build wkhtmltopdf and a basic django-wkhtmltopdf usage. These steps has been tested on a Webfaction server (CentOS 6) through SSH.

The easy way

Enter this command and go to the “Post-install” chapter.

1	curl -fsSkL https://raw.github.com/gist/3608048/wkhtmltopdf.sh \| sh

It will install wkhtmltopdf in ~/bin with its static libraries.

The hard way – Let’s build this

This is mostly taken from the wkhtmltopdf Wiki, but with some no-shared-libraries webserver specifics. Log on SSH, and let the magic begin.

Create a ~/download folder

1 2	$ mkdir -p ~/downloads $ cd ~/downloads

Get wkhtmltopdf-qt:

1
2
3
4

$ git clone git://gitorious.org/+wkhtml2pdf/qt/wkhtmltopdf-qt.git wkhtmltopdf-qt
$ cd wkhtmltopdf-qt
$ git checkout staging
$ QTDIR=. ./bin/syncqt

Configure, and build it! It will take some time (about an hour, which is not much as we disabled a lot of features):

1
2
3

$ ./configure -release -static -fast -exceptions -no-accessibility -no-stl -no-sql-ibase -no-sql-mysql -no-sql-odbc -no-sql-psql -no-sql-sqlite -no-sql-sqlite2 -no-qt3support -xmlpatterns -no-phonon -no-phonon-backend -webkit -no-scripttools -no-mmx -no-3dnow -no-sse -no-sse2 -qt-zlib -qt-libtiff -qt-libpng -qt-libmng -qt-libjpeg -graphicssystem raster -opensource -nomake tools -nomake examples -nomake demos -nomake docs -nomake translations -no-opengl -no-dbus -no-multimedia -openssl -no-declarative -largefile -rpath -no-nis -no-cups -no-iconv -no-pch -no-gtkstyle -no-nas-sound -no-sm -no-xshape -no-xinerama -no-xcursor -no-xfixes -no-xrandr -no-mitshm -no-xinput -no-xkb -no-glib -no-openvg -no-xsync -no-audio-backend -no-sse3 -no-ssse3 -no-sse4.1 -no-sse4.2 -no-avx -no-neon -confirm-license -prefix "../wkqt"
$ gmake -j3
$ gmake install

Then, download wkhtmltopdf, and build it:

1
2
3
4
5

$ cd ~/downloads
$ git clone git://github.com/antialize/wkhtmltopdf.git wkhtmltopdf
$ cd wkhtmltopdf
$ ../wkqt/bin/qmake
$ make

You now have wkhtmltopdf and its static dependencies in ./bin/. Let’s copy them into ~/bin:

1 2	$ mkdir -p ~/bin $ cp bin/* ~/bin/

Post-installation

We need ~/bin in our $PATH. That’s where django-wkhtmltopdf will look for. Add the following line in your ~/.bashrc.

1 2	export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

And source it:

1	$ source ~/.bashrc

We’re done with wkhtmltopdf, let’s install its Django wrapper.

django-wkhtmltopdf

Go to your django app, and install django-wkhtmltopdf with PIP:

1	$ pip install wkhtmltopdf

Then, in your view:

1
2
3
4

from wkhtmltopdf.views import PDFTemplateResponse

def view(request):
PDFTemplateResponse(request, template_name, context_dictionary).rendered_content

Be careful, this last line of code is not documented in the django-wkhtmltopdf’s wiki. It may be subject to changes in future releases. However, that’s the only way I found to get a binary-string instead of a HttpResponse.

That’s all, folks !

Python – Install WeasyPrint on a linux (Webfaction) server

Loïs Di Qual — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 16:28:39 +0000

WeasyPrint is a great python library to generate PDFs from HTML. It beats hands down xhtml2pdf, by interpreting CSS and HTML the right way.

However, it has a lot of dependencies and it just can’t fit in a simple python virtual environment. It took me a whole day to install on Webfaction, so I think it would be helpful to show how to do it properly.

These steps has been tested on a Webfaction CentOS 6 server (python2.7), and they should be the same for others Linux systems. If your system is not exactly the same, you might have to install other dependencies manually. Linux From Scratch is your helpful friend in this kind of situation.

Log to ssh, and let the magic begin.

Dependencies

WeasyPrint relies on the following dependencies:

Pango >= 1.29.3 (with introspection)
pycairo
GdkPixbuf >= 2.25 (with introspection, required for images other than PNG)
PyGObject 3.x

Of course, these dependencies have their own dependencies. It becomes really hard to install all of them by hand, so I made a small shell script to do it automatically. It will install all of them in your home directory (with --prefix=$HOME).

1	$ curl -fsSkL https://raw.github.com/gist/3438324/weasyprint_webfaction.sh \| sh

Then, add the following lines to your ~/.bashrc:

1 2	export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/lib export PYTHONPATH="$HOME/lib/python2.7/site-packages/:$PYTHONPATH"

And source it:

1	$ source ~/.bashrc

Virtual environment

As we will install global python libraries, we need a virtual environment that is aware of system packages. If you didn’t create one yet:

1 2	$ cd /path/to/project $ virtualenv --system-site-packages ./venv

If your virtual env is already created:

1 2	$ cd /path/to/project $ mv ./venv/lib/python2.7/no-global-site-packages.txt ./venv/lib/python2.7/_no-global-site-packages.txt

WeasyPrint

Here we are. Install WeasyPrint using the following lines:

1 2	$ source ./venv/bin/activate $ pip install weasyprint

Finally, test it:

1	$ weasyprint http://weasyprint.org ./weasyprint-website.pdf

If there is an import error, please check that you correctly sourced your ~/.bashrc.

Thanks to Ilias Romanos from the Webfaction Q/A forum for the pyCairo part ! Don’t hesitate to improve the install script on github:gist.

Code-It » python