How to turn web pages into PDFs with Puppeteer and NodeJS

In this tutorial, we will see how to convert web pages into PDF with Puppeteer and Node.js.

Lets start the work with a quick introduction to what Puppeteer is.

What is Puppeteer, and why is it awesome?

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Puppeteers powerful web client-capabilities make it a perfect candidate for web app testing and web scraping.

In this tutorial, we are using a Node backend for the task.

Initialize NPM and set up the usual Express server to get started with the tutorial.

verify to load the Puppeteer NPM package with the following command prior to beginning.

Now we get to the exciting part of the tutorial.

With Puppeteer, we only need a few lines of code to convert web pages into PDF.

First, create a web client instance using Puppeteerslaunchfunction.

Then, we create a new page instance and visit the given page URL using Puppeteer.

We have set thewaitUntiloption tonetworkidle0.

When we usenetworkidle0option, Puppeteer waits until there are no new online grid connections within the last 500 ms.

It is a way to determine whether the site has finished loading.

Finally, we create the PDF from the crawled page content and save it to our gear.

The print toPDF functionis quite complicated and allows for a lot of customization, which is fantastic.

The server will serve the generated PDF directly without ever storing it on disk.

You have completed the conversion of a web page to PDF.

Next, we can change the viewport size to capture websites under different resolutions.

However, we can precisely set the pages viewport size before crawling the page.