Rendral

Stack · Django

Generate PDFs in Django

Django already renders HTML beautifully — templates, context, your CSS. The painful part is turning that into a PDF. WeasyPrint drags in Cairo, Pango and GDK-Pixbuf; xhtml2pdf silently ignores modern CSS; wkhtmltopdf is archived and carries an unpatched CVE.

Skip all of it. Call render_to_string() exactly as you already do, POST the result, and stream the PDF straight back through HttpResponse. Your Dockerfile stays a Python image with no system packages bolted on.

01Call it from Django

render.py
# views.py
import requests
from django.conf import settings
from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.template.loader import render_to_string

def invoice_pdf(request, pk):
    html = render_to_string("invoices/show.html", {"invoice": get_invoice(pk)})

    res = requests.post(
        "https://rendral.com/api/v1/pdf",
        headers={"Authorization": "Bearer " + settings.RENDRAL_API_KEY},
        json={"html": html, "options": {"format": "A4", "pageNumbers": True}},
        timeout=60,
    )
    res.raise_for_status()

    return HttpResponse(res.content, content_type="application/pdf")

Frequently asked

Do I have to change my templates?

No. Send whatever render_to_string() already produces. It renders on current headless Chrome, so grid, flexbox and web fonts behave exactly as they do in a browser.

How do static files and images resolve?

Relative URLs have no origin once the HTML leaves your server, so use absolute https:// URLs for images and CSS, or inline them as data URIs. request.build_absolute_uri() is the usual fix.

Should this run in the request cycle?

For a single document it's fine — a render takes a second or two. For bulk jobs, call it from Celery, or send async: true and receive a webhook when the document is ready.

What about WeasyPrint?

WeasyPrint is a capable pure-Python renderer, but it implements its own CSS subset and needs native libraries installed and patched. This runs the same engine as Chrome, with nothing on your image.

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Start rendering in minutes.

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