Using PDFtk With Rails on Heroku

I recently worked a Rails project in which I had to automate the process of filling out a PDF form from the app. To do so I utilized a gem called pdf-forms which worked great. If this is something that you need to do, I would recommended checking out the article Pre-Filling PDF Form Templates in Ruby-on-Rails with PDFtk which gives some code examples on how to structure your code when working with pdf-forms.

The key dependency which pdf-forms utilizes for working with PDF files is PDFtk which is a command line tool for interacting with PDFs. As such, in order to use pdf-forms you’ll need a binary of PDFtk which pdf-forms can access. On my local dev environment this was no problem, just a matter of downloading and installed the binaries for my platform. However it was a different story when it came to deploying the app on heroku and getting it working there.

It took a bit of digging but I eventually got it working and thought it would be worth sharing here in case someone runs into the same issue.

The following code worked for me, but you might need to make some changes to get it working on your system. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to comment below and I’ll do my best to help.

The first step is to download a binary of pdftk that will work on heroku and add it to your Rails app:

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mkdir -p [my_project]/vendor/pdftk/lib [my_project]vendor/pdftk/bin
cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/millie/pdftk-source.git
cd pdftk-source
tar xzvf pdftk.tar.gz
mv bin/pdftk [my_project]/vendor/pdftk/bin/
mv lib/libgcj.so.12 [my_project]/vendor/pdftk/lib/
cd [my_project]
git add -f vendor/pdftk/
git commit -m "Add pdftk dependencies"

Once that is done you can push up your changes to heroku and then set up the necessary environment variables so that heroku knows where to find this new binary:

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git push heroku master
heroku config:set LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/app/.heroku/vendor/lib:/app/vendor/pdftk/lib
heroku config:set PATH=/app/.heroku/python/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/app/vendor/pdftk/bin

Finally you can try it out and confirm that pdftk is now working on your heroku instance by running bash and trying it out:

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heroku run bash
$ pdftk

If pdftk is working then you should see a bunch of help output from pdftk and that means you are now good to go. Your deployed app should be able to work with pdfs and generate beautifully filled out pdf forms.