How to generate a PDF from a React component (without a headless browser)
How to Generate a PDF from a React Component (Without a Headless Browser) The standard approach for PDF generation from React is painful: run Puppeteer or Playwright in your server, keep a headless browser warm, deal with Chromium installation in Docker, and debug rendering differences between your dev machine and production. There's a cleaner path: render your component to HTML, POST it to a capture API, get a PDF back. No browser process, no Chromium layer, no per-environment debugging. Render to HTML, capture to PDF The pattern works in two steps: use renderToStaticMarkup (or a full SSR render) to get HTML from your React component, then send it to PageBolt's /pdf endpoint. import { renderToStaticMarkup } from ' react-dom/server ' ; async function generatePDF ( component ) { // Step 1: render component to HTML string const html = renderToStaticMarkup ( component ); // Wrap with base styles so the PDF renders cleanly const fullHtml = `<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-
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