Technical Blog

Daily stories at Systems MW – Wadih Maalouf

The latest author of wkhtmltopdf has made the github repository public archive on January 2, 2023, and is recommending not to use it with untrusted HTML.

The best alternative I found is using the chromium headless feature, that has worked quite well for me.

First, install it with the no-recommends option:

apt install chromium --no-install-recommends --no-install-suggests

Then call it with headless mode with below:

chromium --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf-no-header --print-to-pdf=output.pdf https://google.com

Installing this dependency added about 400mb of files, and didn’t add any permanent daemon, and so it remains well contained.