Installation and usage

Install in your Gemfile as usual

gem 'wkhtmltopdf-binary'

In many environments, this is all you need to do. This gem installs a binary stub that tries to determine which wkhtmltopdf binary will work on your system, and point to the packaged binary that most closely matches.

In some environments, invoking this binary will result in an error, saying the needed permissions are not available. This is because wkhtmltopdf-binary ships with gzipped binaries for many platforms, and then picks the appropriate one upon first use and unzips it into the same directory. So if your ruby gem binaries are installed here:

/usr/lib/ruby/versions/2.6/bin/

The various wkhtmltopdf-binaries will be installed here:

/usr/lib/ruby/versions/2.6/lib/ruby/gems/2.6.0/gems/wkhtmltopdf-binary-0.12.5.1/bin/

Giving write access whatever user is running your program (e.g. web server, background job processor), e.g. your own personal user in a dev environment, will fix the problem. After the binary is uncompressed, write access can be revoked again if desired.

chmod -R 777 /usr/lib/ruby/versions/2.6/lib/ruby/gems/2.6.0/gems/wkhtmltopdf-binary-0.12.5.1/bin/

Gem Development

Extracting binaries

Hints for extracting binaries from https://wkhtmltopdf.org/downloads.html (dpkg and rpm2cpio is available on Homebrew).

Debian/Ubuntu

dpkg -x wkhtmltox_0.12.5-1.trusty_amd64.deb .

CentOS

rpm2cpio wkhtmltox-0.12.5-1.centos7.x86_64.rpm | cpio -idmv

macOS

xar -xf wkhtmltox-0.12.5-1.macos-cocoa.pkg
cat Payload | gunzip -dc | cpio -i

Compression

Binaries should be compressed with gzip --best after extracting. The matching binary will be extracted on first execution of bin/wkhtmltopdf.

Testing with Docker

Make sure you have Docker and Docker Compose installed (see https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/ for more information).

There are Dockerfiles for the supported Linux based distributions under .docker. You can build them all with docker-compose build and run each individually with e.g. docker-compose run ubuntu_18.04.

There also is a rudimentary minitest test that simply invokes docker-compose run for each distribution and expects to see the output of wkhtmltopdf --version. Just run rake to run it.

You can clean up after testing with docker-compose down --rmi all.