How to create a simple Node app to generate PDF from HTML

Node offers lots of options for data processing and conversion. One of the common scenarios is converting websites to PDF or PNG.

Available solutions

• Puppeteer

Let's get straight to the point!

Puppeteer

Here's how you can achieve that with puppeteer. It's a straightforward library to automate browsers like Chrome:

import puppeteer from 'puppeteer';
import fs from 'fs';
import path from 'path';

const html = fs.readFileSync(path.join('example', 'index.html'), 'utf-8');

const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ headless: 'new' });
const page = await browser.newPage();

await page.setViewport({ width: 768, height: 1024 });
await page.setContent(html, { waitUntil: 'domcontentloaded' });

const pdf = await page.pdf({
  format: 'Letter'
});

await browser.close();
fs.writeFileSync('output.pdf', pdf);

console.log(`✅ PDF generated: output.pdf (${pdf.length} bytes)`);

That's it. As you can see, it is a mere 15 lines of code, but it does the job. Here are some important parameters you might want to tweak:

page.setViewport({
  width: 768
  height: 1024
})

page.pdf({
  format: "Letter",
  headerTemplate: "string"
  footerTemplate: "string"
  landscape: false,
  scale: 1,
  margin: {
    top: 0,
    left: 0,
    right: 0,
    bottom: 0,
  }
})