node-pdf-creator

Pre-requisites

You need to have a Redis server installed and running on the local environment. You can download and install redis using brew by running

$ brew install redis

and start the service using

$ redis-server

Once redis is installed and running, continue with the installation steps below.

Installation

$ npm install
$ npm start

Creating PDF

• Use Postman (or another API service) to create a POST request to http://localhost/api/v1/create with the following headers:

Authorization: Bearer <APPLICATION_KEY>

(see below for generating application keys) and the following payload:

{
	"fields": {
		"ejsFile": "../templates/default.ejs",
		"properties": {
			"user": {
				"name": "Stephen"
			}
		}
	}
}

• You'll get a response like this

{
  "filename": "http://localhost:3000/api/v1/download/58e0ebe9-49a5-43da-9db6-0f3bbd846609"
}

• Use the link in the URL to download the PDF directly. If using this in a single-page application you'll need to location.href=${filename} redirect the browser to download the PDF.

Generating application keys

To ensure that only signed applications can post to this endpoint, you need to generate an application key and save it to the application. Here's the process

• Run npm run gen-key in the project directory
• Enter your application name (used to identify which app is making the request)
• Make note of the generated application key
• This updates lib/app-keys.json, so you need to commit this file back to the repo and deploy to your server (eg Heroku).

## Downloading at a later stage

• The download will be retained in memory for n days (configurable as a redis TTL value)