Generating and downloading a PDF on an Ubuntu 22.04.5 production server

[Abigailvantol]

Hi devs,

After much trial and error, I’ve finally been able to generate and download a PDF on the production server. I hope these steps save someone many hours of work 😄

Version:
Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS
PHP 8.3.12
Laravel 11.21.0
Node v20.17.0
NPM 10.8.2

Installing Puppeteer (I followed these steps from the spatie/browsershot package documentation) :

# Check if node and npm are installed
node -v && npm -v

# Install puppeteer
sudo npm install -g puppeteer

# Install chromium
npx puppeteer browsers install chrome

# Install dependencies
sudo apt update
sudo apt install libx11-xcb1 libxcomposite1 libasound2t64 libatk1.0-0 libatk-bridge2.0-0 libcairo2 libcups2 libdbus-1-3 libexpat1 libfontconfig1 libgbm1 libgcc1 libglib2.0-0 libgtk-3-0 libnspr4 libpango-1.0-0 libpangocairo-1.0-0 libstdc++6 libx11-6 libx11-xcb1 libxcb1 libxcomposite1 libxcursor1 libxdamage1 libxext6 libxfixes3 libxi6 libxrandr2 libxrender1 libxss1 libxtst6 

Laravel code:

return pdf()
    ->withBrowsershot(function (Browsershot $browsershot) {
        $browsershot->noSandbox();
        $browsershot->setEnvironmentOptions([
            'CHROME_CONFIG_HOME' => storage_path('app/chrome/.config')
        ]);
    })
    ->view('pdf',  $data)
    ->name($filename)
    ->download();

Errors I encountered

Error Output:
================
Error: Failed to launch the browser process!
chrome_crashpad_handler: --database is required
Try 'chrome_crashpad_handler --help' for more information.

The following code solved that error:

$browsershot->setEnvironmentOptions([
    'CHROME_CONFIG_HOME' => storage_path('app/chrome/.config')
]);

[flatcapco]

Just to chime in - I had to do the same but also include:

sudo apt-get install libnss3-dev