Pixelpress

Modeled after ActionMailer, this gem allows you to render PDFs from HTML via Rails' templating engine. Additionally, you can preview your PDF templates via a supplied Rails engine during development.

Installation

Add Pixelpress to your application's Gemfile:

gem "pixelpress"

And then execute:

$ bundle

You'll also need WeasyPrint. It needs to be installed and added to your PATH, so that which weasyprint returns the location of the binary. Read their installation instructions here: https://doc.courtbouillon.org/weasyprint/stable/first_steps.html#installation

Usage

Run the printer generator providing the name of your printer with methods to be generated:

rails generate pixelpress:printer NAME [method_name1 method_name2 ...] [options]

This creates the new printer in app/printers. If you run it the first time, it will also add an ApplicationPrinter and mount the Rails engine in your config/routes.rb file.

Example

$ rails g pixelpress:printer invoice customer_invoice delivery_document

will generate an app/printers/invoice_printer.rb file with this content:

class InvoicePrinter < ApplicationPrinter
  def customer_invoice
    # put your code here
  end

  def delivery_document
    # put your code here
  end
end

The command will also generate corresponding templates as .pdf.erb files located in app/views/printers/invoice/:

customer_invoice.pdf.erb
delivery_document.pdf.erb

You can preview your documents by running rails s and go to

http://localhost:3000/rails/printers

To use your printers in code, you can use them similarly to how you'd use mailers:

InvoicePrinter.customer_invoice.pdf # render a temporary pdf file
InvoicePrinter.customer_invoice.html # get the rendered document in html format

So you can send them to the client via a controller action:

class InvoicesController < ApplicationController
  def show
    document = InvoicePrinter.customer_invoice
    respond_to do |format|
      format.html { render html: document.html }
      format.pdf { send_data document.pdf.read, disposition: 'inline', type: 'application/pdf' }
    end
  end
end

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.