I have been all over stack looking at what is required to do this and have wound up being slightly confused.
Lets get one thing straight this is a local based intra-net and I do understand that PHP is server side.
I am running a company management solution on a web based PHP,JAVA,Jquery Idea. and we would like to print reports directly from the "LINUX" server and receipts etc.
I have installed cups on the server and the server is printing fine and I am now just stuck on whether or not it is actually possible to get the server to print our pdf files we are generating directly from the PHP code.
I would be happy even if we had a bash script to run and check a directory print the pdf and then delete it, even though I would see this as a work around for the time being.
Like I said I do understand that if this was done on the WWW then there would be certain exploits that could be used. If I were to run this system on the www I would have a totally different site that did not allow printing and this function would not be necessary.
Thank You in advance
Alex
If CUPS is configured properly, printing a PDF from the shell is literally as easy as
lpr myfile.pdf
So, once you have written your PDF to a temporary file, you can use any of the available PHP functions to execute that shell command: exec()
, shell_exec()
, system()
You could even do it without writing a temporary file and feed the data directly to lpr
via STDIN (try cat myfile.pdf | lpr
as an example on the shell).
You can feed data to a program's STDIN in PHP if you run it using proc_open()
. The first example from the PHP Manual can be adapted to something like this:
<?php
$descriptorspec = array(
0 => array("pipe", "r"), // stdin is a pipe that the child will read from
);
$process = proc_open('lpr', $descriptorspec, $pipes);
if (is_resource($process)) {
// $pipes now looks like this:
// 0 => writeable handle connected to child stdin
// 1 => readable handle connected to child stdout
// Any error output will be appended to /tmp/error-output.txt
fwrite($pipes[0], $pdf_data);
fclose($pipes[0]);
}
?>
Use PHP::PRINT::IPP
It is the most secure and easiest way for printing from Web using PHP. Here you don't have to enable exploitable php functions like exec()
, shell_exec()
etc.
Basic Usage
<?php
require_once(PrintIPP.php);
$ipp = new PrintIPP();
$ipp->setHost("localhost");
$ipp->setPrinterURI("/printers/epson");
$ipp->setData("./testfiles/test-utf8.txt"); // Path to file.
$ipp->printJob();
?>
Reference
Judicious use of php's shell_exec()
should allow you to print PDFs synchronously, immediately after their creation, thus avoiding the need for bash.
I've not used shell_exec()
for printing so can't help with the detail but essentially, if you can successfully compose a UNIX print command, then you can write the shell_exec()
instruction.