- Getting Started
- Installation
- Key Concepts
- Integrations
- Account & Billing
- Security & Privacy
- PDF Generation
- Reference
- Tutorials
- Troubleshooting
- Excel Generation
- Reference
- Troubleshooting
Development Testing & Localhost Servers
It's very common to build and test software on your local development machine, but unfortunately, DocRaptor requires that all URLs be publicly accessible on the internet (for documents URLs, or assets like images and stylesheets)
Here's some common techniques for working around this issue:
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Use
document_contentinstead ofdocument_url. Sending us the HTML directly eliminates the loading issue of the document itself, and it's faster as we don't have to fetch the document. You might still run into issues with external assets though. All external assets can be embed in the document. CSS and JavaScript can be placed in<style>and<script>areas. Images can be embedded using Base64 encoding. -
A temporarily tunnel can be created to allow your local server to be accessed from global internet. Ngrok.com is a common tool for this, but there are many others. If using a tunnel, you can send us the URL https://ngrok.com/secret-123456/document.html instead of http://localhost/document.html.
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The basic API call integration with your application can be tested with simple content like
<html><body>Hello World!</body></html>and then a command line script or separate script can be used for testing the actual HTML. The final code can be tested on a test or smoke server, or even on production behind a flag that hides the feature from users.