Elliot is a web service that converts HTML to PDFs with Paged.js.
Check out the repo (valentinschabschneider/elliot-demo) or the hosted version at https://elliot-demo.pages.dev.
View the OpenAPI documentation of the hosted demo at https://elliot.up.railway.app/api or locally via http://localhost:3000/api with your browser.
There are some things you should know before making requests to Elliot.
First of all there are two different ways to generate PDF's. Synchronous (now) and asynchronous (soon).
In the background they are basically doing the same thing, but the print now endpoints wait for the print job to finish and then returns the result.
The print soon endpoint returns a job id with whicht you can check the job status and collect the result later.
URL's (file paths with the file:// protocol as well) and raw HTML are supported.
Elliot is able to output PDF's and HTML. The HTML output is a kind of preview of what the generated PDF would look like.
Set the header X-JSON-ERROR-RESPONSE to recieve errors as a JSON response.
| Name | Description | Required | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| REDIS_URL | Used for queue management. | x | |
| NODE_ENV | Already set inside the docker image. | x | |
| API_KEY | Highly recomended if not run in a private network. | ||
| BROWSERLESS_ENDPOINT | Not strictly required but it will not work without it with the docker image. | ||
| MAX_TIMEOUT | Maximum amount of miliseconds that the generation should last. Will cancel the request when reached. | 10000 | |
| PERSIST_PERIOD | How long the job result should be persisted in miliseconds if not cleaned up on collect. | 3600000 | |
| ADDITIONAL_SCRIPTS | Additional js code that will be run in every print. Very useful for handlers. | [] | |
| HTTP_HEADERS | HTTP headers that will be set on the get request for the page to be printed. | [] | |
| CLEANUP_JOB_AFTER_COLLECTED | Clean up the job data after the result has been collected. | false | |
| ENABLE_DASHBOARDS | Enable the /api and /bull-board routes. |
false | |
| DEBUG | This is passed to pagedjs-cli. | false |
This project is basically an api wrapper around the pagedjs-cli package with a few additional tweaks and features. The main difference is that you can skip the polyfill script injection. This allows you to have the polyfill import + additional handlers inside your HTML.
For your convenience Elliot exposes a view static files that can come in handy (preview styles / handlers). You can find them under /src/static which is also exposed under /static when hosted. View the demo sources to see how to use them.
Use the included .devcontainer as your dev environment.