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SOMETHING ABOUT SNAPPY
Ha Nguyen
June 8, 2023
Snappy is a PHP library allowing thumbnail, snapshot or PDF generation from a url or a html page. It uses the excellent webkit-based wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage available on OSX, linux, windows.
You will have to download wkhtmltopdf 0.12.x in order to use Snappy.
Please, check FAQ before opening a new issue. Snappy is a tiny wrapper around wkhtmltox, so lots of issues are already answered, resolved or wkhtmltox ones.
Following integrations are available:
knplabs/knp-snappy-bundle, for Symfony
barryvdh/laravel-snappy, for Laravel
mvlabs/mvlabs-snappy, for Zend Framework
Installation using Composer
$ composer require knplabs/knp-snappy
Usage
Initialization
<?php
require _DIR_ . ‘/vendor/autoload.php’;
use Knp\Snappy\Pdf;
$snappy = new Pdf(‘/usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf’);
// or you can do it in two steps
$snappy = new Pdf();
$snappy->setBinary(‘/usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf’);
Display the pdf in the browser
$snappy = new Pdf(‘/usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf’);
header(‘Content-Type: application/pdf’);
echo $snappy->getOutput(‘http://www.github.com’);
Download the pdf from the browser
$snappy = new Pdf(‘/usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf’);
header(‘Content-Type: application/pdf’);
header(‘Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=”file.pdf”‘);
echo $snappy->getOutput(‘http://www.github.com’);
Merge multiple urls into one pdf
$snappy = new Pdf(‘/usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf’);
header(‘Content-Type: application/pdf’);
header(‘Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=”file.pdf”‘);
echo $snappy->getOutput(array(‘http://www.github.com’,’http://www.knplabs.com’,’http://www.php.net’));
Generate local pdf file
$snappy = new Pdf(‘/usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf’);
$snappy->generateFromHtml(‘<h1>Bill</h1><p>You owe me money, dude.</p>’, ‘/tmp/bill-123.pdf’);
Pass options to snappy
// Type wkhtmltopdf -H to see the list of options
$snappy = new Pdf(‘/usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf’);
$snappy->setOption(‘disable-javascript’, true);
$snappy->setOption(‘no-background’, true);
$snappy->setOption(‘allow’, array(‘/path1’, ‘/path2’));
$snappy->setOption(‘cookie’, array(‘key’ => ‘value’, ‘key2’ => ‘value2’));
$snappy->setOption(‘post’, array(‘key’ => ‘value’));
$snappy->setOption(‘cover’, ‘pathToCover.html’);
// .. or pass a cover as html
$snappy->setOption(‘cover’, ‘<h1>Bill cover</h1>’);
$snappy->setOption(‘toc’, true);
$snappy->setOption(‘cache-dir’, ‘/path/to/cache/dir’);
Reset options
Options can be reset to their initial values with resetOptions() method.
$snappy = new Pdf(‘/usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf’);
// Set some options
$snappy->setOption(‘copies’ => 4);
// ..
// Reset options
$snappy->resetOptions();
wkhtmltopdf binary as composer dependencies
If you want to download wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage with composer you add to composer.json:
$ composer require h4cc/wkhtmltopdf-i386 0.12.x
$ composer require h4cc/wkhtmltoimage-i386 0.12.x
or this if you are in 64 bit based system:
$ composer require h4cc/wkhtmltopdf-amd64 0.12.x
$ composer require h4cc/wkhtmltoimage-amd64 0.12.x
And then you can use it
<?php
use Knp\Snappy\Pdf;
$myProjectDirectory = ‘/path/to/my/project’;
$snappy = new Pdf($myProjectDirectory . ‘/vendor/h4cc/wkhtmltopdf-i386/bin/wkhtmltopdf-i386’);
// or
$snappy = new Pdf($myProjectDirectory . ‘/vendor/h4cc/wkhtmltopdf-amd64/bin/wkhtmltopdf-amd64’);
N.B. These static binaries are extracted from Debian7 packages, so it might not be compatible with non-debian based linux distros
Some use cases
If you want to generate table of contents and you want to use custom XSL stylesheet, do the following:
<?php
$snappy = new Pdf(‘/path/to/binary’);
$snappy->setOption(‘toc’, true);
$snappy->setOption(‘xsl-style-sheet’, ‘http://path/to/stylesheet.xsl’) //or local file;
$snappy->generateFromHtml(‘<p>Some content</p>’, ‘test.pdf’);
Read more on: https://github.com/KnpLabs/snappy
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