PDFKit in rails gives service 500 error

Question

I am trying to use pdfkit in windows in my rails 2.3 environment. However the middleware that pdfkit gives some error which causes rails to load the service error. What do i do about this? Are there any alternatives to PDFkit which are easy to use ?

Well i am currently following the Rails screencast on PDFKit. I installed the pdfkit gem ,wkhtmltopdf and then loaded the middleware in the environment.rb file as require 'pdfkit' config.middleware.use "PDFKit::Middleware" then when i go to any page and add the .pdf extension i get the 500 server error

/!\ FAILSAFE /!\ Sun Jul 11 18:42:53 +0530 2010 Status: 500 Internal Server Error private method chomp' called for nil:NilClass C:/Program Files/BitNami RubyStack/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.5/lib/active_support/whiny_nil.rb:52:inmethod_missing' C:/Program Files/BitNami RubyStack/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/pdfkit-0.3.3/lib/pdfkit/pdfkit.rb:69:in wkhtmltopdf' C:/Program Files/BitNami RubyStack/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/pdfkit-0.3.3/lib/pdfkit/pdfkit.rb:33:ininitialize' C:/Program Files/BitNami RubyStack/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/pdfkit-0.3.3/lib/pdfkit/middleware.rb:25:in new' C:/Program Files/BitNami RubyStack/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/pdfkit-0.3.3/lib/pdfkit/middleware.rb:25:incall' C:/Program Files/BitNami RubyStack/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/string_coercion.rb:25:in call' C:/Program Files/BitNami RubyStack/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rack-1.0.1/lib/rack/head.rb:9:incall' C:/Program Files/BitNami RubyStack/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rack-1.0.1/lib/rack/methodoverride.rb:24:in call' C:/Program Files/BitNami RubyStack/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/params_parser.rb:15:incall'

I suggest including more concrete information: routing, how you're trying to use pdfkit, etc. — sarnold

Luiz Loja Luiz Loja · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-15T14:08:17

If you are using pdfkit on windows you need to install the wkhtmltopdf. After it you will need to configure the wkhtmltopdf on your enviroment.rb like this :D.

PDFKit.configure do |config|
   config.wkhtmltopdf = 'C:\opt\wkhtmltopdf\wkhtmltopdf.exe'
   config.default_options = {
     :page_size => 'Legal',
     :print_media_type => true
   }
   config.root_url = "http://localhost" # Use only if your external hostname is unavailable on the server.
end

I hope this helps.

PDFKit in rails gives service 500 error

1 Answers