This is a demo application, the specifications can be found at the project's README.md.

Those are mostly the main ones:

• Ruby
• Rails
• PostgreSQL
• TeX Live

A working install of Ruby and Rails is required to run the app (I've used the latest versions of everything). TeX Live is used to generate the PDF.

$ bundle install

There are two routes (as defined in the specification).

• GET /api/v1/documents/list
• POST /api/v1/documents

The routes will either respond with 200 or 400, depending on what is being sent to the server.

To make a POST request:

$ xh post http://localhost:3000/api/v1/documents \
description="test" \
document_data='{"customer_name": "Joe", "contract_value": 1000}' \
template="$(cat template.html)"

The API also understands the remote:=true parameter, in this mode the PDF file will be stored remotely and the pdf_url field will be updated accordingly. Note that uploads are set to expire after 24 hours and the server is hard-coded to 0x0.st but more providers can be added later.

Please be mindful when using this parameter, note that 0x0.st is a free of charge service and abusing it is discouraged.

Similarly, to make a GET request:

$ xh http://localhost:3000/api/v1/documents/list

Tests can be run with rake.

You might be wondering why TeX Live is used to produce the final PDF document and not some gem.

I've found that most of the well-known gems to convert HTML into PDF use the wkhtmltopdf utility, which has been discontinued.

TeX Live (LaTeX) is fully supported on my Linux distribution, produces the highest quality documents I've ever seen and LaTeX offers a high degree of control over the presentation.

On my system (Arch Linux) those packages were required to get xelatex to work:

• texlive-basic 2024.2-1
• texlive-bin 2024.2-1
• texlive-fontsrecommended 2024.2-1
• texlive-latex 2024.2-1
• texlive-xetex 2024.2-1

On macOS, TeX Live can be installed from Homebrew, the instructions can be found here.