Convert HTML to PDF using Qtwebkit with PHP

Wkhtmltopdf is a very useful application to create pdf from html (webpage). This article will help to create pdf of a webpage using php script and Linux command line tool.

Step 1: Install wkhtmltopdf in Linux

Download wkhtmltopdf from google code and install to linux system.

# cd /opt
# wget https://wkhtmltopdf.googlecode.com/files/wkhtmltopdf-0.9.9-static-i386.tar.bz2
# tar xjf wkhtmltopdf-0.9.9-static-i386.tar.bz2
# mv wkhtmltopdf-i386 /usr/bin/wkhtmltopdf
# chown apache:apache /usr/bin/wkhtmltopdf
# chmod +x /usr/bin/wkhtmltopdf

Step 2: Create Pdf Using Command Line

First check wkhtmltopdf script it its properly working from command line. Below command will create pdf of http://google.com web page.

# /usr/bin/wkhtmltopdf http://google.com google.pdf

Step 3: PHP Code to Create Pdf Using wkhtmltopdf

Use below block of php code to generate pdf from html ( webpage ). This script required to be enabled shell_exec function for Apache. Most of shared hosting provides doesn’t allow this function.

Create a file name getPdf.php using below code and put it on your website document root

Open Following url to generate pdf of website ( html ).

Syntax:
http://youdomain.com/getPdf.php?url=<website url>&pdf=<pdf name>

Example:
https://tecadmin.net/getPdf.php?url=http://google.com&pdf=google.pdf