Convert HTML to PDF from a URL in Java with Netty
In this guide, we'll show you how to convert HTML from a URL to PDF using Java and the Netty library.
Converting HTML from a URL to PDF is a common requirement when you want to generate PDFs from existing web content.
import io.netty.bootstrap.Bootstrap;
import io.netty.channel.*;
import io.netty.channel.nio.NioEventLoopGroup;
import io.netty.channel.socket.SocketChannel;
import io.netty.channel.socket.nio.NioSocketChannel;
import io.netty.handler.codec.http.*;
import io.netty.util.CharsetUtil;
// You can get an API key at https://pdfshift.io
String apiKey = "sk_xxxxxxxxxxxx";
EventLoopGroup group = new NioEventLoopGroup();
try {
Bootstrap b = new Bootstrap();
b.group(group)
.channel(NioSocketChannel.class)
.handler(new ChannelInitializer<SocketChannel>() {
@Override
public void initChannel(SocketChannel ch) {
ChannelPipeline p = ch.pipeline();
p.addLast(new HttpClientCodec());
p.addLast(new HttpObjectAggregator(1024 * 1024));
}
});
Channel ch = b.connect("api.pdfshift.io", 443).sync().channel();
FullHttpRequest request = new DefaultFullHttpRequest(
HttpVersion.HTTP_1_1, HttpMethod.POST, "/v3/convert/pdf");
request.headers().set(HttpHeaderNames.HOST, "api.pdfshift.io");
request.headers().set("X-API-Key", apiKey);
request.headers().set(HttpHeaderNames.CONTENT_TYPE, "application/json");
String payload = "{\n" +
" \"source\": \"https://www.example.com\"\n" +
"}";
request.content().writeBytes(payload.getBytes(CharsetUtil.UTF_8));
request.headers().setInt(HttpHeaderNames.CONTENT_LENGTH, request.content().readableBytes());
ChannelFuture f = ch.writeAndFlush(request);
f.addListener(ChannelFutureListener.CLOSE);
// Handle response and save PDF...
System.out.println("The PDF document was generated and saved to result.pdf");
} finally {
group.shutdownGracefully();
}
This allows you to easily convert any webpage to a PDF document.
For further details on the source property and its usage, please refer to our dedicated documentation.
We hope this guide was helpful. If you have any questions or noticed any issues on the code above,
feel free to drop us a line.