Install wkhtmltopdf static binary on Ubuntu Server

pdf · ubuntu

Running wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage to create PDF files from HTML files on a Mac is easy and simple. When you need to install it on a non-mac production server a little bit of work is involved.

The Problem: Installing it simply via sudo apt-get install wkhtmltopdf on Ubuntu will install a reduced functionality version which is probably not what you want. According to the manual the reduced functionality version does not include the following features.

  • Printing more then one HTML document into a PDF file.
  • Running without an X11 server.
  • Adding a document outline to the PDF file.
  • Adding headers and footers to the PDF file.
  • Generating a table of contents.
  • Adding links in the generated PDF file.
  • Printing using the screen media-type.
  • Disabling the smart shrink feature of webkit.

If you need any of these, then you need to setup the static version of wkhtmltopdf.

I just installed the wkhtmltopdf static binary successfully on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric on an Amazon EC2 instance with these steps:

Optional: Install Ubuntu on EC2

I used a 32bit Ubuntu image on EC2. Do a search for oneiric i386 on the Ubuntu AMI Locator page and spin one up and connect to it.
Hint: the compilation will take hours even on a small instance. So be prepared if you want to use a t1.micro instance.

Now connect to your server via ssh.

Become root

sudo -i

Install updates

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Install the needed dependencies for wkhtmltopdf

apt-get build-dep libqt4-gui libqt4-network libqt4-webkit
apt-get install openssl build-essential xorg git-core git-doc libssl-dev

Install the custom QT version for wkhtmltopdf

This will take quite some time. Grab a few coffees.

git clone git://gitorious.org/+wkhtml2pdf/qt/wkhtmltopdf-qt.git wkhtmltopdf-qt
cd wkhtmltopdf-qt
./configure -nomake tools,examples,demos,docs,translations -opensource -prefix ../wkqt
make -j3
make install
cd ..

Install wkhtmltopdf

git clone git://github.com/antialize/wkhtmltopdf.git wkhtmltopdf
cd wkhtmltopdf
../wkqt/bin/qmake
make -j3
make install

The wkhtmltopdf binary should now be here: /bin/wkhtmltopdf and you can use it like this:

wkhtmltopdf www.nytimes.com nytimes.pdf

Hope this works for you. For most of this i used the wkhtmltopdf Manual.

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