[Bug]: Inconsistent Behavior with spatie/laravel-pdf on Ubuntu OpenLiteSpeed Server

[kaspernowak]

What happened?

When attempting to generate a PDF using spatie/laravel-pdf from a browser request on a remote Ubuntu 22.04 server running OpenLiteSpeed with PHP 8.2 and NVM Node, it fails with a browser process launch error. However, running the same functionality via CLI on the server works as expected and the PDF is generated.

When I try to save a test pdf like this:

Route::get('/test-pdf', function () {
    $htmlContent = "<h1>Hello World!</h1><p>This is a test PDF generated from HTML.</p>";
    $pdfPath = public_path('hello_world.pdf');

    Pdf::html($htmlContent)
        ->withBrowsershot(function ($browsershot) {
            $browsershot 
                ->setIncludePath('$PATH:'.config('browsershot.include_path')) // Necessary for this to work with nvm.
        }) 
        ->save($pdfPath);
        
        return 'PDF generated and saved to ' . $pdfPath;
});

It just works from my local ubuntu machine when navigating to /test-pdf, with a local install of nvm and puppeteer with node.

When I pull my repository on my remote ubuntu server with the same puppeteer setup, I always get this error when navigating to /test-pdf:

Error Output:
================
Error: Failed to launch the browser process!

TROUBLESHOOTING: https://pptr.dev/troubleshooting

I have tried everything from the pptr troubleshooting, without luck.

I expected the PDF generation to work from the browser request just as it does when executed from the CLI, without any errors.

How to reproduce the bug

I made an MWE laravel project to investigate this: https://github.com/kaspernowak/laravel-pdf

Follow the testing instructions in the repository readme:

Testing instructions

Test node and puppeteer setup

1. Navigate to your project root.
2. Run test-pptr.cjs from your CLI with node:

   node test-pptr.cjs
   

3. See the Chromium path in your console output.
4. This should just work if node and puppeteer is installed correctly, check npm list to verify that puppeteer is installed, if you get any errors.

Test PDF saving from browser

1. Navigate to /test-pdf and check if a hello_world.pdf pdf file has been saved successfully to your projects /public directory.

• This always fails for me.

Test PDF saving from CLI using your Virtual Host executable user (depends on your OpenLiteSpeed setup)

1. Navigate to your project root.
2. Run the /test-pdf route with the custom route:call command:

   php artisan route:call /test-pdf
   

• This always works for me.

Package Version

1.5.0

PHP Version

8.2

Laravel Version

11.5

Which operating systems does with happen with?

Linux

Notes

I am suspecting that this has something to do with running this on a OpenLiteSpeed webserver, as it works when the project runs with php artisan serve.

[kaspernowak]

After some tinkering and using the deprecated puppeteer v17, as advised in the documentation, I received a different error:

Error: Failed to launch the browser process! ../../base/allocator/partition_allocator/partition_address_space.cc(70) Check failed: false

This led me to a OpenLiteSpeed forum thread, where a potential fix would be to increase the memSoftLimit and memHardLimit limit of my webserver php. Increasing this to 80000M solved the issue, and I could process pdf's from my laravel app running on ubuntu 22.04 with OpenLiteSpeed.

But I did not want to be using puppeteer v17 and neither did I want to rely on globally installed puppeteer packages when I am running nvm with my project. It was a struggle to get the latest puppeteer to work with nvm, but I managed to do it in the end with this default config:

Pdf::default()
  ->withBrowsershot(function ($browsershot) {
    $browsershot
      ->setIncludePath('$PATH:'.config('browsershot.include_path'))
      ->addChromiumArguments([
        'headless=shell'
      ]);
  });

I found that headless=true also works but headless=new does not, neither does->headless() or ->headlessNew(). Not setting the headless chromium argument results in error.

Hope this is usefull for anyone.