Setup wicked_pdf and wkhtmltopdf with Rails 3 and Heroku

gistfile1.md

##Refs

• wkhtmltopdf
• wicked_pdf
• Blog: Generate PDFs in Rails 3.2

Install wicked_pdf

Add to Gemfile: gem 'wicked_pdf'

In terminal: bundle

For local, install wkhtmltopdf

In terminal: git checkout 6e2d550 /usr/local/Library/Formula/wkhtmltopdf.rb

In terminal: brew install wkhtmltopdf

Make sure you installed wkhtmltopdf 0.9.9

For Heroku, download wkhtmltopdf

Go to wkhtmltopdf

Download the wkhtmltopdf-0.9.9 Linux Static Binary (amd64) binary

Copy the binary to ``bin/wkhtmltopdf-amd64```

Install QT

In terminal: brew install qt

Set up the Config

Create a file: config/wicked_pdf.rb

if Rails.env.staging? || Rails.env.production?
  exe_path = Rails.root.join('bin', 'wkhtmltopdf-amd64').to_s
else
  exe_path = Rails.root.join('bin', 'wkhtmltopdf').to_s
  # exe_path = '/usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf'
end

Render PDF in Controller

  def show
    @model = Model params[:id]

    respond_to do |format|
      format.html
      format.csv do
        model_csv = ModelCSV.new(@lesson)
        send_data(model_csv.to_csv, filename: model_csv.generate_csv_filename)
      end
      format.pdf do
        render pdf: "#{@model.uuid}",
               template: 'admin/modelss/show.pdf.haml',
               disposition: 'attachment',
               :toc => { :depth => 2, :header_text => 'TEXT', disable_links: false }
      end
    end
  end

Create a PDF View

Thank you this was very useful. One minor clarification is that my local wkhtmltopdf binary was stored in a different place, so my config/initializers/wicked_pdf.rb file was a bit different. As well, the full config syntax is shown below.

if Rails.env.staging? || Rails.env.production?
  WickedPdf.config = {:exe_path => Rails.root.join('bin', 'wkhtmltopdf-amd64').to_s}
else
  WickedPdf.config = { :exe_path => '/usr/bin/wkhtmltopdf'}
end

If you use Rails Config gem. It is much cleaner.

   wkhtmltopdf_path: "<%= Rails.root.join('bin', 'wkhtmltopdf-amd64').to_s %>"

This is well outdated. Where can we get the current linux static binary? I'm looking around, looks like I need to extract it.

@jancel You can get the static binaries here: http://wkhtmltopdf.org/downloads.html

I found this. https://github.com/h4cc/wkhtmltopdf-amd64

Running wkhtmltopdf 0.12.2.1 on OS X 10.10.3 in a Ruby 2.2.2 Rails 4.2.2 project for local development via...

brew install caskroom/cask/brew-cask
brew cask install wkhtmltopdf

Then used the amd64 binary from https://github.com/h4cc/wkhtmltopdf-amd64 out of app's bin directory (as described above) on Heroku for staging and production environments.