wicked_pdf: (RuntimeError) Error: Failed to execute /.../shared/bundle/ruby/2.1.0/bin/wkhtmltopdf

This is an occasional error i receive, not sure of the cause, because it you come back a few minutes later, the problem disappears.

full message

  Error: Failed to execute:
["/var/www/myapp/shared/bundle/ruby/2.1.0/bin/wkhtmltopdf", "-q", "file:///tmp/wicked_pdf20150630-30571-1f9qkcc.html", "/tmp/wicked_pdf_generated_file20150630-30571-hqfxd7.pdf"]
Error: PDF could not be generated!
 Command Error: QPainter::begin: Paint device returned engine == 0, type: 2
QPainter::setRenderHint: Painter must be active to set rendering hints
QPainter::translate: Painter not active
QPainter::setPen: Painter not active
QPainter::setBrush: Painter not active
QPainter::setWorldTransform: Painter not active
QPainter::setOpacity: Painter not active
QPainter::setFont: Painter not active

respond_to do |format|
      format.html
      format.pdf do
        render pdf: 'invoice',
               layout: 'pdf.html.erb',
               show_as_html: params[:debug].present?
      end

Does anyone have an idea? or perhaps just a way of trapping the error and redirecting to an error page ( asking to try again in a few minutes, if this is a concurrency issue )

About this issue

Original URL
State: open
Created 9 years ago
Comments: 16

Most upvoted comments

the installation on my ubuntu server 16.04 of these lines fixed the issue…

“apt-get install openssl build-essential xorg libssl-dev xfonts-75dpi”

thanks to @cesc1989

rome3ro on Jun 22, 2016

@unixmonkey Thanks very much for your answer. I’ve checked the issues you mentioned, but none of those is related to my case. Plus, I’ve just installed wkhtmltopdf as you mentioned and followed @cesc1989 scripts. I don’t know why the pdf is rendered without adding the configuration in the initializer in my case.

@cesc1989 Thanks very much for your answer since I just in stall xorg and xfonts-75dpi while the other were already installed. The pdf is rendered now, cool 👍 Anyway, I’ve got a problem rendering unicode character. The Unicode characters become black boxes. I’ve already had “<meta charset='utf-8' />” in the header. I cannot figure the problem of that black boxes. You almost solve my problem. Hope you can help me with this last one, thanks!

PirunSeng on May 18, 2016

@PirunSeng Are you using Ubuntu 14.04? I’ve installed wkhtmltopdf for both 32 and 64 bit versions using these scripts:

32bit

apt-get install xfonts-75dpi
wget http://download.gna.org/wkhtmltopdf/0.12/0.12.2/wkhtmltox-0.12.2_linux-trusty-i386.deb
dpkg -i wkhtmltox-0.12.2_linux-trusty-i386.deb

64bit

apt-get install openssl build-essential xorg libssl-dev xfonts-75dpi
wget http://download.gna.org/wkhtmltopdf/0.12/0.12.2/wkhtmltox-0.12.2_linux-trusty-amd64.deb
dpkg -i wkhtmltox-0.12.2_linux-trusty-amd64.deb

Good luck!

cesc1989 on May 17, 2016

@PirunSeng You can install wkhtmltopdf through your package manager, or download a precompiled binary from http://wkhtmltopdf.org/downloads.html, and point to the binary location in an initializer like this:

WickedPdf.config = {
  exe_path: '/usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf'
}

I tried to do a little research into why this is happening for some people, and though I’m not positive this is this specific issue, I have seen reports of the “painter” not being able to draw on the virtual web browser because of the viewport having an ambiguous height or width…as to why it doesn’t happen all the time, I’m not sure.

Here’s a search across the main wkhtmltopdf issue tracker.

unixmonkey on May 17, 2016

@PirunSeng since I stopped using the wkhtmltopdf-binary gem and decided to install the library, haven’t seen this error. I suggest you do it too.

cesc1989 on May 17, 2016