self-hosted PDF API

If you want a self-hosted PDF API, there are a few good options depending on what you need:

Common self-hosted PDF API choices

1. Gotenberg

• Best for: HTML/CSS/JS to PDF, Office docs to PDF
• Features: REST API, Docker-based, Chromium rendering
• Use cases: Generate invoices, reports, web pages as PDFs
• Repo: https://github.com/gotenberg/gotenberg

2. Apache PDFBox

• Best for: Java-based PDF creation/manipulation
• Features: Create, edit, extract text/images, merge, split
• Use cases: Backend services already using Java
• Note: Not really an API server by itself; you build one around it

3. LibreOffice headless

• Best for: Converting DOCX/XLSX/PPTX to PDF
• Features: Can be run in containers and exposed via your own API
• Use cases: Document conversion pipelines

4. Puppeteer / Playwright-based service

• Best for: Rendering HTML to PDF with browser fidelity
• Features: Full browser rendering, highly accurate output
• Use cases: Complex layouts, dashboards, invoices

5. PDFcpu

• Best for: Go-based PDF processing
• Features: Merge, split, validate, optimize, watermark, rotate
• Use cases: Lightweight self-hosted PDF operations

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If you want an actual ready-made API service

The most practical one is usually:

Gotenberg

• Easy to run in Docker
• Exposes HTTP endpoints
• Good for HTML-to-PDF and office document conversion

Example:

docker run --rm -p 3000:3000 gotenberg/gotenberg:latest

Then you can POST HTML or files to its endpoints.

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If you want, I can help you with one of these:

1. Pick the best self-hosted PDF API for your use case
2. Show a Docker Compose setup
3. Write example API calls
4. Compare Gotenberg vs LibreOffice vs Puppeteer

If you tell me what you need PDF generation for, I’ll recommend the best option.