Fix „command failed: /usr/bin/wkhtmltopdf ...“ using PDFKit middleware

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS x64, Ruby 1.8.7, Rails 2.13, PDFKit 0.5.4, Phusion Passenger Apache 2

I ran into this, when I started using passenger to deal with the Single Thread Issue Archive which caused my webrick to deadlock when an ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches "...") occurred.

These steps brought me a little further

(1) assert dependencies are installed

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 sudo aptitude install openssl build-essential xorg libssl-dev

(2) only for 64bits OS Run one by one the following commands:

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sudo wget http://wkhtmltopdf.googlecode.com/files/wkhtmltopdf-0.9.9-static-amd64.tar.bz2
sudo tar xvjf wkhtmltopdf-0.9.9-static-amd64.tar.bz2
sudo mv wkhtmltopdf-amd64 /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf

Tell PDFKit where to find your wkhtmltopdf:

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Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  require "pdfkit"
  config.middleware.use PDFKit::Middleware
  PDFKit.configure do |config|
    config.wkhtmltopdf = '/usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf'   # <-- the fix
  end
end

Note

The wkhtmltopdf in /usr/bin/wkhtmltopdf is the version you installed with apt-get install wkhtmltopdf and the version in /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf is, as you probably know, the version you installed running the (2) steps.

Important Note

I still got this error when an ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches "...") occurred, e.g. missing a file like image, css, etc. because of broken PDFKit v0.5.4. At the moment I'm fine with v0.5.1.