Install FerrumPDF browser dependencies#1060
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sigmundpetersen
moved this from All the things 💤
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chahmedejaz
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dacook
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dacook
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Good work, thanks for sorting this out.
I wondered if Chromium would be a better option because it is open-source, but I don't know that it would make much difference.
I also wonder if this will consume more resources for PDF generation than before, but have no idea. We will see!
I would just like to also get @mkllnk's review so he is aware of it.
| - libgbm1 # GPU buffer management, required even in headless mode | ||
| - libxshmfence1 # Shared memory fences for X11 shm rendering | ||
| state: present | ||
| become: yes |
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I would have thought that the chrome package would have published these dependencies so that apt could automatically install them.
Oh well, thanks for making this work 👍
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I guess that these dependencies are only needed when you try to run it without a desktop.
| - name: add google chrome signing key | ||
| apt_key: | ||
| url: https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | ||
| become: yes | ||
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| - name: add google chrome repository | ||
| apt_repository: | ||
| repo: "deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" | ||
| filename: google-chrome | ||
| become: yes | ||
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| - name: install google chrome stable | ||
| apt: | ||
| name: google-chrome-stable | ||
| state: present | ||
| update_cache: yes | ||
| become: yes |
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Can't we use Chromium? Then we don't need an additional repository.
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@mkllnk @dacook - I think we should be able to use Chromium as well. I added Chrome here because it was already present on my machine, so I tested with it, and FerrumPDF worked as expected with it. Moreover, I thought it's well maintained and would be more stable for production. 😅 Please let me know if you'd like me to try Chromium instead and update the PR accordingly. Thanks. |
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I've got only Chromium installed on my machine and I can generate PDFs with FerrumPdf. Chromium and Chrome share the same code and therefore I would expect similar quality. I think that we should go for completely open source when it's easy and in this case it seems even easier than installing Chrome. |
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Sure, makes sense @mkllnk. I'll update the PR and get back. Thanks 👍🏻 |
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@chahmedejaz, I wanted to apply this to all production servers now because the FerrumPDF PR is tested and ready for merging. First I tried to run this against the staging servers but it failed on some, e.g. uk_staging. It looks like there's another PPS for ffmpeg4 on au_staging that is needed but not installed by this role. And on fr_staging that PPA wasn't needed as libpipewire-0.3 is supplied by the Ubuntu sources. It looks like uk_staging has Ubuntu's extended security support enabled and those servers don't serve the newer version of libpipewire. I thought you installed it on all staging servers? Did I get that wrong? Now looking at au_prod, it doesn't have ESM but it also doesn't have the new libpipewire available. By the way, I didn't need secrets to run only this role because it doesn't use any secrets: In order to resolve this quickly, I added the ppa that was on au-staging and I'm applying it to production servers. Several failed at first:
Now working through them. ... The common problem seems to be outdated apt sources. I deactivated the ones that didn't work. We need to replace our servers soon anyway. |
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Thanks @mkllnk for picking this up and going through this. I think we had a discussion on it in recent delivery circle that it's not installed on UK. Ref meeting notes: https://community.openfoodnetwork.org/t/delivery-circle-20th-may-2026/3958 I'm about to work on it hopefully today. I'll add the missing ppa in the role as well for consistency. Anyway, thank you so much for going through this. Edit: Just saw, you have already addressed this in the role. Thanks 👍🏻 |
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What changed and why
Ferrum/FerrumPDF requires a Chrome browser binary for headless PDF rendering, unlike wkhtmltopdf which bundled its own rendering engine.
This PR adds a dedicated Ansible
chromerole to install Google Chrome and required runtime libraries on provisioned environments. This ensures Ferrum-based PDF rendering works consistently outside CI, including staging and production servers.Changes
chromeAnsible rolegoogle-chrome-stablefrom the official Google repositorylibgbm1libxshmfence1playbooks/provision.ymlRequired By