PHP ChromeToPdf

PHP ChromeToPdf provides a simple and clean interface to ease PDF and image creation with Google Chrome. The Google Chrome must be installed and working on your system. See the section below for details.

History

Every time i had convert url to pdf or to take screenshot of some url i had to install several libraries , i know there are very good libraries available like phantomJs,wkhtmltopdf and some others... but there are always rendering issue
like some supports bootstrap ,some not some time html5 problem etc..
and this was all annoying so i decided to make this little wrapper around chrome
by using chrome results i achieved following results.

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

in-fact 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 too

Url To PDF (accessing site as bigger 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 url (accessing site as bigger 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 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 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 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 options: for complete list of options you can visit https://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/

Wrapper Methods

• constructor: Accepts $url to visit(for pdf/screenshot) as first parameter you can pass this as null and later use setUrl, and second parameter is binary path of google-chrome installed in your system as second parameter if no binaryPath is provided is uses default location /usr/bin/google-chrome but you still can provide binary path later using setBinaryPath, constructor also put some default arguments like headless , disable-gpu which are necessary for google-chrome to work on cli
• setBinaryPath which accepts binary path and set it for you
• setArguments to set options of google-chrome it accepts array of options in a format

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

if your argument doesn't has values like --headless you can pass empty value e.g [--headless=>'']

• setArgument to set option of google-chrome it accepts two parameter $argument , $value if your argument doesn't has a value like --headless you can pass 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 some directory but in need you can use this method to change that

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

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

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

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

• getPdf it receives optional path parameter to save the pdf file at if not provided it will save in output directory or temp directory of your operating system depending if you properly set up the output directory,
  for this check setOutputDirectory option,
  it will convert your provided url to pdf and return the location of newly saved pdf

• getScreenShot it receives optional path parameter to save the pdf file at if not provided it will save in output directory or temp directory of your operating system depending if you properly set up the output directory
  for this check setOutputDirectory option,
  it will take 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 ask chrome to access site as mobile browser

• getArguments returns all the arguments set

there are some other getters available too in case you need 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