Wicked Pdf VS puppeteer

You have a few options when trying to create a PDF in a Rails environment. Prawn and Wicked PDF have been around for quite a while. I have been using both gems and they work fine. However, they have a few limitations that can make it difficult to handle more complex PDFs. I recently discovered Grover, which can remediate some of this inflexibility in creating PDFs.

# WickedPDF Global Configuration # # Use this to set up shared configuration options for your entire application. # Any of the configuration options shown here can also be applied to single # models by passing arguments to the `render :pdf` call. # # To learn more, check out the README: # # https://github.com/mileszs/wicked_pdf/blob/master/README.md WickedPdf.config ||= {} WickedPdf.config.merge!({ layout: "pdf.html.erb", orientation: "Landscape", lowquality: true, zoom: 1, dpi: 75 })

A couple of popular gems to convert HTML to PDF in Rails are PDFKit and WickedPDF. They both use a command line utility called wkhtmltopdf under the hood; which uses WebKit to render a PDF from HTML.

Thanks for sharing - it takes a lot to share these sort of personal experiences. I've definitely been there, too.

Aside from all the good and valid comments about reducing scope and shipping an MVP, I'd like to raise another point which may be controversial (or even wrong), but still worth raising:

Would it have been different if you had used Rails? A few of the problems you mention (rich text editing, validation, and to some extend, pdf exports) are very easily solved in Rails. Take rich text editing: It's literally a couple minutes to use ActionText. Or validations / forms, there's really not much work to do. PDF exports are also not too hard via wicked_pdf [1] if you're okay with fixing some formatting quirks later on.

I've seen both worlds by writing tons of JS / React code myself, and at that time (2016-2018) those problems were almost an order of magnitude more time-costly to implement in SPAs. I remember react-router.. not great memories.

Of course, all the points reducing MVP scope still hold, yadda yadda, but.. if you could have had all those features (nearly) for free, would you be at another stage now? Who knows.

[1] https://github.com/mileszs/wicked_pdf

Install Axios, the unofficial ChatGPT API library, and Puppeteer. The ChatGPT API uses Puppeteer as an optional peer dependency to automate bypassing the Cloudflare protections.

Browsers have their difference and inconsistencies, so I would suggest you look into writing tests for example with a framework like puppeteer.js (https://pptr.dev/) which will let you verify if everything is working as you would expected (for both browsers)

Puppeteer is a Node.js library that automates several browser actions such as form submission, crawling single-page applications, UI testing, and in particular, web scraping and generating screenshots of web pages.

Puppeteer – A web testing tool based on CDP (Chrome devtools protocol), Puppeteer also works perfectly with Chromium-based browsers and has limited support from Firefox. Puppeteer has a supportive community that works hard on documentation. The tool has unofficial ports for Python, Java, etc. When it comes to tests, it uses JavaScript/TypeScript.

That’s not how you scrape CSR Webpages, use something like puppeteer https://github.com/puppeteer/puppeteer

You might want to start with an actual web scraper first before getting into creating an api if your knowledge is sparse. Try learning to use the Puppeteer package and saving the data locally first. Good luck https://pptr.dev/

Puppeteer by Google is a Node.js library providing an API for headless browser control via DevTools Protocol. Originally, it was an automated testing library, but it has been successfully used for web scraping. Supported browsers: Chrome / Chromium, limited – Firefox. Supported programming languages: Node.js; has an unofficial Python library, “Pyppeteer.”

Install the ChatGPT API library and Puppeteer. The ChatGPT API uses Puppeteer as an optional peer dependency to automate bypassing the Cloudflare protections.

we should look like real humans. we need our request to look like it's coming from a real human in a real browser !! puppeteer to the rescue !!

cypress.io or puppeteer are popular e2e options.