Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice

#21

Post by cjr » Sun, Oct 21, 2018, 11:21 AM UTC

stevekemp wrote: post #5

I've reported many bugs in projects that turn "URL" to "PDF". You need to be sure you're limiting the kind of URLs that people can submit. For example ensure that nobody makes a PDF of : * file:////etc/passwd * http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/local-hostname * http://localhost:8080/ I'd say over half of the "PDF-creation" projects posted here have been vulnerable to some/all of those attacks. (I continue to be…

I'm the owner/dev of one of those paid services, and yes, competition is fierce, but people do still pay for the convenience of not having to manage it themselves. One look at the issue count of puppeteer/phantomjs/selenium/slimer... tells its own story.

Re: Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice

#22

Post by fastball » Sun, Oct 21, 2018, 1:10 PM UTC

Why not just

> Print

> Open as PDF

?

Re: Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice

#23

Post by jarofgreen » Sun, Oct 21, 2018, 1:28 PM UTC

stevekemp wrote: post #5

I've reported many bugs in projects that turn "URL" to "PDF". You need to be sure you're limiting the kind of URLs that people can submit. For example ensure that nobody makes a PDF of : * file:////etc/passwd * http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/local-hostname * http://localhost:8080/ I'd say over half of the "PDF-creation" projects posted here have been vulnerable to some/all of those attacks. (I continue to be…

Also that people can't use them to mine crypto currency. Seen owner of one such project blog about how that happened to them.

Re: Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice

#24

Post by supermatt » Sun, Oct 21, 2018, 1:47 PM UTC

fastball wrote: post #22

Why not just > Print > Open as PDF ?

To save your microservice having to run a graphical environment and simulate mouse interaction?

Re: Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice

#25

Post by Ibethewalrus » Sun, Oct 21, 2018, 3:19 PM UTC

gildas wrote: post #18

bramd wrote: post #15

I'm still looking for a service like this, but that creates a nicely tagged PDF and conveys the HTML structure in the PDF tags. Tagged PDFs are a requirement in many processes for accessibility or archival reasons.

Why not using HTML instead of PDF? I'm the author of an extension that allows to save faithfully a web page into an HTML file [1]. From my point of view, that should be the best solution for archiving web pages in a file. Votes on HN disagree with me though [2], I wished I could understand why. [1] https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18243721

read recently PDF is defacto standard by government

Re: Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice

#26

Post by liftbigweights » Sun, Oct 21, 2018, 3:31 PM UTC

You can also use pdf printers available in linux distros and even windows now.

Re: Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice

#27

Post by cjimti » Sun, Oct 21, 2018, 4:48 PM UTC

stevekemp wrote: post #5

I've reported many bugs in projects that turn "URL" to "PDF". You need to be sure you're limiting the kind of URLs that people can submit. For example ensure that nobody makes a PDF of : * file:////etc/passwd * http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/local-hostname * http://localhost:8080/ I'd say over half of the "PDF-creation" projects posted here have been vulnerable to some/all of those attacks. (I continue to be…

These are great security suggestions and I should make some clarifications on the intended use. We use txPDF as a backend Microservice and not open to direct public use. It is good for automating report generation from other portions of a larger system.

Re: Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice

#28

Post by cjimti » Sun, Oct 21, 2018, 4:50 PM UTC

rav wrote: post #14

krn wrote: post #13

A basic command line alternative using Headless Chrome[1]: chrome --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf https://www.chromestatus.com/ [1] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-c...

Similar functionality is packaged in wkhtmltopdf, which essentially runs Webkit headless to print to PDF. https://wkhtmltopdf.org/

txPDF is a simple containerized web services wrapper around wkhtmltopdf, intended to be used as a Microservice component in a larger system.

Re: Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice

#29

Post by btown » Sun, Oct 21, 2018, 5:11 PM UTC

https://prerender.com/ is a great service (fully MIT-licensed at https://github.com/prerender/prerender ) for this type of thing, both for rendering internal pages and for scraping/rendering external sites that rely heavily on client-side code.

Re: Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice

#30

Post by jotto » Sun, Oct 21, 2018, 5:26 PM UTC

alternatively if you want a SaaS REST API:

   curl https://service.prerender.cloud/screenshot/https://google.com/ > out.jpg

   curl https://service.prerender.cloud/pdf/https://google.com/ > out.pdf

   curl https://service.prerender.cloud/https://google.com/ > out.html

https://www.prerender.cloud/