why cant bundler find wkhtmltopdf on server

Question

I am using the pdfkit gem and it is working in development using wkhtmltopdf from the wkhtmltopdf-binary gem.

On the server pdfkit fails with the error

undefined method `chomp' for nil:NilClass

at

shared/bundle/ruby/2.1.0/gems/pdfkit-0.8.2/lib/pdfkit/configuration.rb:22:in `wkhtmltopdf'

The method that fails is

def wkhtmltopdf
  @wkhtmltopdf ||= (defined?(Bundler::GemfileError) && File.exists?('Gemfile') ? `bundle exec which wkhtmltopdf` : `which wkhtmltopdf`).chomp
end

After some debugging it appears that `bundle exec which wkhtmltopdf' when called from this method returns blank.

When called from the commandline in application root it gives

/var/www/<app>/shared/bundle/ruby/2.1.0/bin/wkhtmltopdf

I have tried initializing the value of @wkhtmltopdf from the initializer as follows

PDFKit.configure do |config|
  if Rails.env.production?
    config.wkhtmltopdf = "/var/www/<app>/shared/bundle/ruby/2.1.0/bin/wkhtmltopdf"
  end 
  config.default_options = {
    :page_size => 'A4',
  }
end

But I still get the same error. ie it is still trying to run the 'which' command and failing with a blank.

Rokibul Hasan Rokibul Hasan · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-07T04:34:57

bundle exec which wkhtmltopdf returns nil, which is causing this error.

There is a quick fix is to redefine the method in an initializer

require 'pdfkit'
class PDFKit
  class Configuration
    def wkhtmltopdf
      @wkhtmltopdf ||= `which wkhtmltopdf`.chomp
    end
  end
end

You can take a look form here

why cant bundler find wkhtmltopdf on server

1 Answers