wicked_pdf does not run on Ubuntu server : wkhtmltopdf: cannot connect to X server

Syl picture Syl · Jul 9, 2013 · Viewed 19.6k times · Source

I'm trying to use wicked_pdf on my prod server but it keeps failling :

RuntimeError (Failed to execute:
"/usr/bin/wkhtmltopdf" -q        "file:////tmp/wicked_pdf20130709-23109-1adqx5g.html" "/tmp/wicked_pdf_generated_file20130709-23109-1ic5dbe.pdf"
Error: PDF could not be generated!
 Command Error: wkhtmltopdf: cannot connect to X server
):
  app/controllers/contrats_controller.rb:15:in `block (2 levels) in show'
  app/controllers/contrats_controller.rb:11:in `show'

I tried to follow this answer : wkhtmltopdf: cannot connect to X server but it still does not work.

Answer

Syl picture Syl · Jul 12, 2013

This post helped me to resolve my problem : http://www.stormconsultancy.co.uk/blog/development/generating-pdfs-in-rails-with-pdfkit-and-deploying-to-a-server/

I'm reproducing here the step from this post that helped me to install it :

# first, installing dependencies
sudo aptitude install openssl build-essential xorg libssl-dev

# for 64bits OS
wget http://wkhtmltopdf.googlecode.com/files/wkhtmltopdf-0.9.9-static-amd64.tar.bz2
tar xvjf wkhtmltopdf-0.9.9-static-amd64.tar.bz2
mv wkhtmltopdf-amd64 /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf

He also create an initializer to tell to pdfKit where it is, so this method is for wicked PDF and PDF Kit.