wkhtmltopdf 0.12 on Ubuntu 14.04

The Problem

wkhtmltopdf is a library for rendering PDFs from HTML or live web pages.

  • apt-get install wkhtmltopdf  will install the older 0.9 version, which isn’t compatible with the Snappy PHP wrapper
  • wkhtmltopdf 0.9 is also unable to render on ‘headless’ operating systems and needs another package to simulate a display. The newer 0.12 version doesn’t have this problem.

The Solution

Manually Install the ‘Static’ Binary from wkhtmltopdf.org

(NB: If you’re not a root or super user most commands will need to be sudo…)

Download the Ubuntu “Trusty” build.
At the time of writing this is wkhtmltox-0.12.2.1_linux-trusty-amd64.deb

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/wkhtmltopdf/0.12.2.1/wkhtmltox-0.12.2.1_linux-trusty-amd64.deb

Rename it something easy to type like wkhtml.deb

Extract it with this command

ar x wkhtml.deb
# if ar not installed run this:
# apt-get install binutils

Extract the binary

tar xf data.tar.xz

Move the binary file to /usr/bin

mv wkhtmltopdf /usr/bin/wkhtmltopdf

Now PDF Rendering Should Work

wkhtmltopdf http://example.com myTest.pdf