Generate PDFs on Amazon AWS with PHP and Puppeteer: The Best Way

Several months ago, I wrote my first article explaining how to use Browsershot and Puppeteer on AWS Lambda. We saw how to ship a brotli-fied Chrome with our lambda, how to un-brotlify Chrome at the runtime, and how to use it with Browsershot.

But yesterday, I had to update the Chrome version and I faced many issues:

• I had to download Chrome binary and Swiftshader librairies from chrome-aws-lambda and do the update manually
• Since binaries are not the same, I had to update the ChromiumFactory to handle the file swiftshader.tar.br
• I had to update the Chrome flags list by using those from chrome-aws-lambda.

This is the first, and the last time I want to do that.

Why should I do what chrome-aws-lambda already does well? Isn't possible to use chrome-aws-lambda with Browsershot?

After many hours, I was able to use chrome-aws-lambda with a bridge between Browsershot PHP class and Browsershot's bin/browser.js, thanks to the method Browsershot#setBinPath that allows us to use a custom .js file.

​Cleaning

First, let's clean a bunch of things:

• delete chromium/ directory
• delete Chromium and ChromiumFactory classes (and remove them from Symfony services configuration)
• uninstall dependency vdechenaux/brotli-bin-amd64: composer remove vdechenaux/brotli-bin-amd64

​Installing chrome-aws-lambda

You can't install whatever version of chrome-aws-lambda or puppeteer you want, they must be compatible together, see chrome-aws-lambda's versioning table.

When writing this article, I decided to go with chrome-aws-lambda@~2.0.0 (which use Chrome 79):

{
  ...
  "dependencies": {
{+    "chrome-aws-lambda": "~2.0.0",+}
    "puppeteer": "~2.0.0"
  }
}

​Creating the bridge

The most important thing is to handle the input and the output the same way than Browsershot does. It means:

• your binary must be able to handle argument -f <file.json> or JSON passed at 1st argument
• your binary must output data in base64 when needed

It may be hard, but in fact it's not.

I've created a bin/browser.js file which:

• get input (request) like Browsershot does (literally a copy/paste)
• update this request with chrome-aws-lambda's data (Chrome path and flags)
• override process.argv[2] with the new JSON request
• and run the original Browsershot JS file

#!/usr/bin/env node

const fs = require('fs');
const chromium = require('chrome-aws-lambda');

const [, , ...args] = process.argv;

/**
 * There are two ways for Browsershot to communicate with puppeteer:
 * - By giving a options JSON dump as an argument
 * - Or by providing a temporary file with the options JSON dump,
 *   the path to this file is then given as an argument with the flag -f
 */
const request = args[0].startsWith('-f ')
  ? JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync(new URL(args[0].substring(3))))
  : JSON.parse(args[0]);

async function bridge() {
  // merge Browsershot options with chromium-aws-lambda options
  request.options.executablePath = await chromium.executablePath;
  request.options.args = [
    ...chromium.args,
    ...request.options.args,
    '--disable-dev-profile',
    '--user-data-dir=/dev/null',
  ];

  // override process arguments
  process.argv[2] = JSON.stringify(request);

  // then execute Browsershot's initial binary
  return require('../vendor/spatie/browsershot/bin/browser');
  // or if you use Browsershot ^3.38, see https://github.com/spatie/browsershot/pull/399
  return require('../vendor/spatie/browsershot/bin/browser').callBrowser(chromium.puppeteer);
}

bridge();

This is a real bridge between the Browsershot PHP and Browsershot JS.

​Using the bridge

In your PHP code, when you use Browsershot:

$myBrowsershotInstance->setBinPath('/path/to/bin/browser.js');

It is also possible to manually run this file, like Browsershot can do:

$ PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin NODE_PATH=`npm root -g` node 'bin/browser.js' \
    '{"url":"https:\/\/google.fr\/","action":"screenshot","options":{"type":"png","args":["--disable-dev-shm-usage"],"viewport":{"width":1920,"height":1080},"ignoreHttpsErrors":true,"waitUntil":"domcontentloaded"}}'

If some base64 code is shown, then the bridge is working correctly!