defmodule ChromicPDF do @moduledoc """ ChromicPDF is a fast HTML-to-PDF/A renderer based on Chrome & Ghostscript. ## Usage ### Start Start ChromicPDF as part of your supervision tree: def MyApp.Application do def start(_type, _args) do children = [ # other apps... {ChromicPDF, chromic_pdf_opts()} ] Supervisor.start_link(children, strategy: :one_for_one, name: MyApp.Supervisor) end defp chromic_pdf_opts do [] end end ### Print a PDF or PDF/A ChromicPDF.print_to_pdf({:url, "file:///example.html"}, output: "output.pdf") PDF printing comes with a ton of options. Please see `ChromicPDF.print_to_pdf/2` and `ChromicPDF.convert_to_pdfa/2` for details. ## Security Considerations Before adding a browser to your application's (perhaps already long) list of dependencies, you may want consider the security hints below. ### Escape user-supplied data Make sure to escape any user-provided data with something like [`Phoenix.HTML.html_escape`](https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix_html/Phoenix.HTML.html#html_escape/1). Chrome is designed to make displaying HTML pages relatively safe, in terms of preventing undesired access of a page to the host operating system. However, the attack surface of your application is still increased. Running this in a containerized application with a small RPC interface creates an additional barrier (and has other benefits). ### Running in offline mode For some apparent security bonus, browser targets can be spawned in "offline mode" (using the DevTools command [`Network.emulateNetworkConditions`](https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/tot/Network#method-emulateNetworkConditions). Chrome targets with network conditions set to `offline` can't resolve any external URLs (e.g. `https://`), neither entered as navigation URL nor contained within the HTML body. def chromic_pdf_opts do [offline: true] end ### Chrome Sandbox By default, ChromicPDF will run Chrome targets in a sandboxed OS process. If you absolutely must run Chrome as root, you can turn of its sandbox by passing the `no_sandbox: true` option. defp chromic_pdf_opts do [no_sandbox: true] end ### SSL connections In you are fetching your print source from a `https://` URL, as usual Chrome verifies the remote host's SSL certificate when establishing the secure connection, and errors out of navigation if the certificate has expired or is not signed by a known certificate authority (i.e. no self-signed certificates). For production systems, this security check is essential and should not be circumvented. However, if for some reason you need to bypass certificate verification in development or test, you can do this with the `:ignore_certificate_errors` option. defp chromic_pdf_opts do [ignore_certificate_errors: true] end ## Worker pools ChromicPDF spawns two worker pools, the session pool and the ghostscript pool. By default, it will create as many sessions (browser tabs) as schedulers are online, and allow the same number of concurrent Ghostscript processes to run. ### Concurrency To increase or limit the number of concurrent workers, you can pass pool configuration to the supervisor. Please note that these are non-queueing worker pools. If you intend to max them out, you will need a job queue as well. defp chromic_pdf_opts do [ session_pool: [size: 3] ghostscript_pool: [size: 10] ] end ### Operation timeouts By default, ChromicPDF allows the print process to take 5 seconds to finish. In case you are printing large PDFs and run into timeouts, these can be configured configured by passing the `timeout` option to the session pool. defp chromic_pdf_opts do [ session_pool: [timeout: 10_000] # in milliseconds ] end ### Automatic session restarts to avoid memory drain By default, ChromicPDF will restart sessions within the Chrome process after 1000 operations. This helps to prevent infinite growth in Chrome's memory consumption. The "max age" of a session can be configured with the `:max_session_uses` option. defp chromic_pdf_opts do [max_session_uses: 1000] end ## Chrome zombies > Help, a Chrome army tries to take over my memory! ChromicPDF tries its best to gracefully close the external Chrome process when its supervisor is terminated. Unfortunately, when the BEAM is not shutdown gracefully, Chrome processes will keep running. While in a containerized production environment this is unlikely to be of concern, in development it can lead to unpleasant performance degradation of your operation system. In particular, the BEAM is not shutdown properly… * when you exit your application or `iex` console with the Ctrl+C abort mechanism (see issue [#56](https://github.com/bitcrowd/chromic_pdf/issues/56)), * and when you run your tests. No, after an ExUnit run your application's supervisor is not terminated cleanly. There are a few ways to mitigate this issue. ### "On Demand" mode In case you habitually end your development server with Ctrl+C, you should consider enabling "On Demand" mode which disables the session pool, and instead starts and stops Chrome instances as needed. If multiple PDF operations are requested simultaneously, multiple Chrome processes will be launched (each with a pool size of 1, disregarding the pool configuration). defp chromic_pdf_opts do [on_demand: true] end To enable it only for development, you can load the option from the application environment. # config/config.exs config :my_app, ChromicPDF, on_demand: false # config/dev.exs config :my_app, ChromicPDF, on_demand: true # application.ex @chromic_pdf_opts Application.compile_env!(:my_app, ChromicPDF) defp chromic_pdf_opts do @chromic_pdf_opts ++ [... other opts ...] end ### Terminating your supervisor after your test suite You can enable "On Demand" mode for your tests, as well. However, please be aware that each test that prints a PDF will have an increased runtime (plus about 0.5s) due to the added Chrome boot time cost. Luckily, ExUnit provides a [method](https://hexdocs.pm/ex_unit/ExUnit.html#after_suite/1) to run code at the end of your test suite. # test/test_helper.exs ExUnit.after_suite(fn _ -> Supervisor.stop(MyApp.Supervisor) end) ExUnit.start() ### Only start ChromicPDF in production The easiest way to prevent Chrome from spawning in development is to only run ChromicPDF in the `prod` environment. However, obviously you won't be able to print PDFs in development or test then. ## Chrome Options ### Custom command line switches The `:chrome_args` option allows to pass arbitrary options to the Chrome/Chromium executable. defp chromic_pdf_opts do [chrome_args: "--font-render-hinting=none"] end ### Debugging Chrome errors Chrome's stderr logging is silently discarded to not obscure your logfiles. In case you would like to take a peek, add the `discard_stderr: false` option. defp chromic_pdf_opts do [discard_stderr: false] end ## Telemetry support To provide insights into PDF and PDF/A generation performance, ChromicPDF executes the following telemetry events: * `[:chromic_pdf, :print_to_pdf, :start | :stop | exception]` * `[:chromic_pdf, :capture_screenshot, :start | :stop | :exception]` * `[:chromic_pdf, :convert_to_pdfa, :start | :stop | exception]` Please see [`:telemetry.span/3`](https://hexdocs.pm/telemetry/telemetry.html#span-3) for details on their payloads, and [`:telemetry.attach/4`](https://hexdocs.pm/telemetry/telemetry.html#attach-4) for how to attach to them. Each of the corresponding functions accepts a `telemetry_metadata` option which is passed to the attached event handler. This can, for instance, be used to mark events with custom tags such as the type of the print document. ChromicPDF.print_to_pdf(..., telemetry_metadata: %{template: "invoice"}) The `print_to_pdfa` function emits both the `print_to_pdf` and `convert_to_pdfa` event series, in that order. ## How it works ### PDF Printing * ChromicPDF spawns an instance of Chromium/Chrome (an OS process) and connects to its "DevTools" channel via file descriptors. * The Chrome process is supervised and the connected processes will automatically recover if it crashes. * A number of "targets" in Chrome are spawned, 1 per worker process in the `SessionPool`. By default, ChromicPDF will spawn each session in a new browser context (i.e., a profile). * When a PDF print is requested, a session will instruct its assigned "target" to navigate to the given URL, then wait until it receives a "frameStoppedLoading" event, and proceed to call the `printToPDF` function. * The printed PDF will be sent to the session as Base64 encoded chunks. ### PDF/A Conversion * To convert a PDF to a PDF/A-3, ChromicPDF uses the [ghostscript](https://ghostscript.com/) utility. * Since it is required to embed a color scheme into PDF/A files, ChromicPDF ships with a copy of the royalty-free [`eciRGB_V2`](http://www.eci.org/) scheme by the European Color Initiative. If you need to be able to use a different color scheme, please open an issue. """ use ChromicPDF.Supervisor end