Now start your server, and visit, for example: There you go, an API that takes a target URL and renders a PDF version of it. The next step is to write code to open up a browser and load a website:Īwait page. That installation with download among other things a Chromium browser into your node modules folder, so be patient, it may take a minute or two more than a regular package. Generating pre-rendered content for Single Page Applications (SPAs)īefore we do anything with Puppeteer, we need to install it, and it is as easy as installing any other package with NPM.Create a PDF document and/or an image of a web page.
Puppeteer allows you to work with a browser in headless mode, which allows you to do things like: Due to the lack of a GUI, the interactions with a headless browser take place over a command line.Įven though Puppeteer is mainly a headless browser, you can configure and use it as non-headless Chrome or Chromium. In that sense, a headless browser is simply just another browser that understands how to render HTML web pages and process JavaScript. If you are unfamiliar with the term headless browsers, it’s simply a browser without a GUI. Is, “A Node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol”. What Is Puppeteer, and Why Is It Awesome? ) that deal with PDF generation, but those libraries are often hard to use and involve a ton of steps, and APIs we are not familiar with.įortunately, there is an easier way, which is to convert web pages into PDF format, and that can be done with the help of a tool called Puppeteer. When we are faced with such a task our intuition is to google “JavaScript create pdf” and we get awesome SDKs (like PDFKit
A common request I have seen in my career, especially when building web applications, is to generate PDF documents that users of the app can download.
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