FPDF issue while generating pdf with images due to PHP 'allow_url_fopen' setting

Question

I am facing a problem with FPDF while generating the PDF file with images as explained here. Finally I found the reason for this issue but I am not sure how to fix that one, can anybody suggest some good solution to handle that issue.

This problem is due to the allow_url_fopen setting of my server, if I enable that setting then the FPDF library is generating the PDF file with images also without any errors.

I am using this FPDF library for one of my client sites, he(client) disabled the 'allow_url_fopen' setting for security reasons and he is not intersted to enable that setting. how can I solve this issue with out enabling that setting of my server.

Answer 1

You can use CURL to open remote resources.

$curlHandler=curl_init();

curl_setopt($curlHandler, CURLOPT_URL, "http://youurl.com");

curl_setopt($curlHandler, CURLOPT_HEADER,0);

curl_setopt($curlHandler, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

$output =curl_exec($curlHandler);

....

curl_close($curlHandler);

Answer 2

Honestly, your best bet is going to finding another way to generate PDFs. FPDF has had only one update since 2004, and no longer seems to be actively maintained.

Some other pure-PHP options include TCPDF and Zend_PDF, both of which seem to be actively maintained and supported.

You should also give some consideration to other PDF generation techniques. For example, there are quite a few HTML-to-PDF converters, some commercial, some open source. wkhtmltopdf, for example, uses the WebKit rendering engine (the one that Safari and Chrome use) to create PDFs.

Answer 3

I had similar problem, the fix for it without setting allow_url_fopen on was 1. move the image to the server hosting the script 2. assume the image is imagefile.gif inside a folder called images 3. access the image in my script doing this $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."images/imagesfile.gif"