printing over network from PHP app

Question

I have a set of printers connect over a network with Static IP assigned to each printer.

Now i have a PHP web application running on a linux server which needs to send print jobs, to these printer over the network.

Is this possible using lpr or cups and how do i go about it.

Answer 1

i was also doing research on this...and i think the below written code can help you in handling printer in linux

<?php
$printer = "\\\\Pserver.php.net\\printername");
if($ph = printer_open($printer))
{
   // Get file contents
   $fh = fopen("filename.ext", "rb");
   $content = fread($fh, filesize("filename.ext"));
   fclose($fh);

   // Set print mode to RAW and send PDF to printer
   printer_set_option($ph, PRINTER_MODE, "RAW");
   printer_write($ph, $content);
   printer_close($ph);
}
else "Couldn't connect...";
?>

Answer 2

You could use the LPR Printer class from here:

http://www.phpclasses.org/package/2540-PHP-Abstraction-for-printing-documents.html

Example:

<?php 
include("PrintSend.php");
include("PrintSendLPR.php");

$lpr = new PrintSendLPR(); 
$lpr->setHost("10.0.0.17"); //Put your printer IP here 
$lpr->setData("C:\\wampp2\\htdocs\\print\\test.txt"); //Path to file, OR string to print. 

$lpr->printJob("someQueue"); //If your printer has a built-in printserver, it might just accept anything as a queue name.
?>

Answer 3

Try PHP::PRINT::IPP

It worked perfectly for me.

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

Answer 4

This question has been asked before. See print to a network printer using PHP

The answer given that time was exec("lpr -P 'printer' -r 'filename.txt');

However, the answer was never accepted so not sure whether the OP found it helpful; it certainly looks like it ought to do the trick, but it's not quite a direct and easy method of doing it from within PHP.

A number of other resources I found were also recommending variations on this approach.

Digging a bit deeper, I see PHP has got a Printer module in PECL. However it's only for Windows, and looks like it's not well maintained. But in case it helps, the link it here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.printer.php

I think the answer ultimately is that PHP isn't really designed for this kind of thing, and doesn't have built-in functionality to do it. But since you can shell out to external commands using exec() and similar, it shouldn't be too hard to get it working, albeit not quite ideal.