PHP ChromeToPdf

PHP ChromeToPdf provides a simple and clean interface to easily create PDFs and images with Google Chrome. Google Chrome must be installed and working on your system. See the section below for details.

History

Every time that I've converted a url to pdf or taken screenshot of some url I had to install several libraries.

I understand that there are very good libraries available such as: phantomJs, wkhtmltopdf and others, but there have always been rendering issues.

Some libraries support bootstrap while others do not. There are also intermittent html5 problems etc. All of these problems were considerably annoying, therefore I decided to make this little wrapper around Chrome. I have achieved following results:

• No more css issues (bootstrap, css3 )
• No more html5 issues
• No need to use xvfb

in-fact it's a painless conversion

Installation

Install the package through composer:

composer require dawood/phpchromepdf

Make sure, that you include the composer autoloader somewhere in your codebase.

Examples

There are several examples provided in examples folder as well

Url To PDF (accessing site as a desktop browser)

use dawood\phpChrome\Chrome;


$chrome=new Chrome('https://youtube.com','/usr/bin/google-chrome');
$chrome->setOutputDirectory(__DIR__);
//not necessary to set window size
$chrome->setWindowSize($width=1477,$height=768);
print "Pdf successfully generated :".$chrome->getPdf().PHP_EOL;

Url To PDF (accessing site as mobile browser)

use dawood\phpChrome\Chrome;

$chrome=new Chrome('https://facebook.com','/usr/bin/google-chrome');
$chrome->setOutputDirectory(__DIR__);
$chrome->useMobileScreen();
//not necessary to set window size
$chrome->setWindowSize($width=768,$height=768);
print "Pdf successfully generated :".$chrome->getPdf().PHP_EOL;

Take screenshot of the url (accessing site as desktop browser)

use dawood\phpChrome\Chrome;


$chrome=new Chrome('https://facebook.com','/usr/bin/google-chrome');
$chrome->setOutputDirectory(__DIR__);
//not necessary to set window size
$chrome->setWindowSize($width=1366,$height=1024);
print "Image successfully generated :".$chrome->getScreenShot().PHP_EOL;

Take screenshot of the url (accessing site as mobile browser)

use dawood\phpChrome\Chrome;


$chrome=new Chrome('https://facebook.com','/usr/bin/google-chrome');
$chrome->setOutputDirectory(__DIR__);
$chrome->useMobileScreen();

//not necessary to set window size
$chrome->setWindowSize($width=768,$height=768);
print "Image successfully generated :".$chrome->getScreenShot().PHP_EOL;

Take screenshot of the Html File

include '../vendor/autoload.php';

use dawood\phpChrome\Chrome;

$chrome=new Chrome(null,'/usr/bin/google-chrome');
$chrome->useHtmlFile(__DIR__.'/index.html');
print "Image successfully generated :".$chrome->getScreenShot().PHP_EOL;

convert Html file to pdf

include '../vendor/autoload.php';

use dawood\phpChrome\Chrome;

$chrome=new Chrome(null,'/usr/bin/google-chrome');
$chrome->useHtmlFile(__DIR__.'/index.html');
print "Pdf successfully generated :".$chrome->getPdf().PHP_EOL;

convert Html code to pdf / screenshot

include '../vendor/autoload.php';

use dawood\phpChrome\Chrome;

$chrome=new Chrome(null,'/usr/bin/google-chrome');
$chrome->useHtml("<h2>I am test html</h2>");
print "Pdf successfully generated :".$chrome->getPdf().PHP_EOL;
print "screenShot successfully generated :".$chrome->getScreenShot().PHP_EOL;

convert Html code to pdf / screenshot and save at the desired location

include '../vendor/autoload.php';

use dawood\phpChrome\Chrome;

$chrome=new Chrome(null,'/usr/bin/google-chrome');
$chrome->useHtml("<h2>I am test html</h2>");
print "Pdf successfully generated :".$chrome->getPdf("/tmp/mypdf.pdf").PHP_EOL;
print "screenShot successfully generated :".$chrome->getScreenShot("/tmp/hello/test.jpg").PHP_EOL;

Setting options

The google-chrome shell command accepts different types of arguments, for the complete list of arguments you can visit https://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/

Wrapper Methods

• constructor: Accepts the $url to visit(for pdf/screenshot) as the first parameter. You can pass this as null and later use setUrl. The second parameter is the binary path of google-chrome installed in your system. If no binaryPath is specified it uses the default location /usr/bin/google-chrome. You can still provide a binary path later using the setBinaryPath constructor. Default arguments like headless, disable-gpu are necessary for google-chrome to work on cli
• setBinaryPath Accepts a binary path and sets it for you
• setArguments sets arguments for google-chrome, it accepts an array of arguments in a format

[
   $argument1=>$value1,
   $argument2=>$value2,  
]

If your argument does not have values like --headless you can pass an empty value e.g [--headless=>'']

• setArgument to set arguments for google-chrome. It accepts two parameters $argument, $value if your argument does not have a value like --headless you can pass an empty value e.g setArgument('--headless','')

• setChromeDirectory the directory where google-chrome will save your profile, it is not mandatory as google-chrome by default uses a save directory of its own, however, you can use this method to change that according to your requirements

• setUrl to set the url to convert to pdf or to take screenshot

• useHtmlFile to use the file instead of the url to convert to pdf or to take screenshot

• useHtml to use the html code instead of the url to convert to pdf or to take screenshot

• setOutputDirectory directory to save the output (screenshots and pdf) the default directory is a temporary directory of your operating system

• getPdf receives an optional path parameter to save the pdf file. If not specified it will save in the output directory or the temp directory of your operating system depending on whether or not you set up the output directory.
  For this check the setOutputDirectory option, which will convert your provided url to pdf and return the location of the newly saved pdf

• getScreenShot receives an optional path parameter to save the pdf file. If not provided it will save in the output directory or the temp directory of your operating system depending on whether or not you set up the output directory for this check setOutputDirectory option. It will take a screenshot of your provided url and return the location of newly saved image

• setWindowSize you can set the chrome window size using this method. It accepts two parameters $width and $height

• useMobileScreen instructs chrome to access site as mobile browser

• getArguments returns all the arguments set

there are some other getters available as well, depending on your requirements getUrl , getBinaryPath , getOutputDirectory

Installation of google-Chrome (linux/mac )

wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | sudo apt-key add -
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google.list'

sudo apt-get install libxss1 libappindicator1 libindicator7 libosmesa6

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y google-chrome-stable

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libOSMesa.so.6 /opt/google/chrome/libosmesa.so

then try running google-chrome from shell to verify it's installation

Installation of google-Chrome (Windows)

Just Install updated version of chrome(after V 61.*)  
that-s it

then try running C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application>chrome.exe --headless from cmd terminal to verify it's installation

Note the path of chrome directory can be different in your case

License

The PhpChromeToPdf is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license.

Contribution

Thanks to all of the contributors ,
Check Contribution for contribution rules

Author

Dawood Ikhlaq and Open source community