PrintedJs.HeadlessWebView 0.2.0

PrintedJs.HeadlessWebView

Cross-platform headless webview and vector PDF rendering runtime for .NET powered by Wry and OS-native web engines.

Features

• True Headless Rendering: Windowless rendering using WebView2 (Windows), WebKitGTK (Linux), or WKWebView (macOS).
• Direct-to-Vector PDF: High-fidelity PDF generation without rasterization artifacts.
• In-Memory & File Output: Generate in-memory byte[] streams or atomic filesystem writes.
• Async/Await: Modern Task-based asynchronous API with cancellation support.

Usage

using PrintedJs.HeadlessWebView;

await using var webview = await HeadlessWebView.CreateAsync(new WebViewConfig
{
    Html = "<h1>Hello from PrintedJS Headless WebView!</h1>"
});

byte[] pdfBytes = await webview.PrintToPdfAsync(new PdfPrintOptions
{
    Landscape = false,
    PageWidth = 8.27,
    PageHeight = 11.69,
    PrintBackground = true
});

await File.WriteAllBytesAsync("document.pdf", pdfBytes);

Linux & Docker Deployment

On Linux, PrintedJs.HeadlessWebView utilizes WebKitGTK and GTK 3. Because GTK requires an active display connection during initialization, headless environments (such as Docker containers or cloud VMs without an X/Wayland server) require a virtual framebuffer like Xvfb.

Required System Packages (Debian / Ubuntu)

Install the runtime dependencies and standard web fonts:

apt-get update && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
    libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0 \
    libgtk-3-0 \
    xvfb \
    fontconfig \
    fonts-liberation \
    ca-certificates

Running in Docker

Wrap your application execution with xvfb-run -a or run Xvfb in the background.

FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspnet:8.0 AS runtime
WORKDIR /app

# Install WebKitGTK, GTK3, Xvfb, and system fonts
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
    libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0 \
    libgtk-3-0 \
    xvfb \
    fontconfig \
    fonts-liberation \
    ca-certificates \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

# Disable hardware GPU probe inside container
ENV WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1

COPY ./publish .

# Run with virtual framebuffer
ENTRYPOINT ["xvfb-run", "-a", "dotnet", "YourApp.dll"]

License

MIT License © PrintedJS Contributors