Output a PDF, from HTML without doing an HTTP request/response roundtrip on the backend.

wkhtmltopdf_handler.py

# imports ...
from subprocess import call
from uuid import uuid4
from django.template.loader import render_to_string
from django.http import HttpResponse

request_uuid = str(uuid4())
output_pdf = '/tmp/output-%s.pdf' % request_uuid
destination_html = '/tmp/output-%s.html' % request_uuid

with open(destination_html, 'w') as html:
    output = render_to_string('some stuff')
    html.write(output.encode("UTF-8"))

command = '%(wkhtmltopdf)s  %(cmd_opts)s file://%(html)s %(pdf)s' % {
    'wkhtmltopdf': settings.WKHTMLTOPDF, # location of the binary
    'html': destination_html,
    'pdf': output_pdf,
    'cmd_opts': '--disable-javascript',
}
call(command, shell=True)
assert os.path.exists(output_pdf) == True, "unable to find %s" % output_pdf

with open(output_pdf, "rb") as fsock:
    response = HttpResponse(fsock.read(), mimetype='application/pdf')
outfile = 'myfilename.pdf'
response['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename=%s' % outfile
return response

Note to self: used in this comment as a response to this one in this thread about PDF utils.

Is extracted from an otherwise internal, horribly custom app.