How toGenerate a PDF in Remix with Resource Routes

Remix has a feature called Resource Routes which let you create endpoints returning anything.

Using them, you could return a Response with a PDF, how to generate the PDF will depend on what libraries you are using, if you use something like React PDF you could do something like this:

// routes/pdf.tsx
import { renderToStream } from "@react-pdf/renderer";
// this is your PDF document component created with React PDF
import { PDFDocument } from "~/components/pdf";
import type { LoaderFunction } from "remix";

export let loader: LoaderFunction = async ({ request, params }) => {
  // you can get any data you need to generate the PDF inside the loader
  // however you want, e.g. fetch an API or query a DB or read the FS
  let data = await getDataForThePDFSomehow({ request, params });

  // render the PDF as a stream so you do it async
  let stream = await renderToStream(<PDFDocument {...data} />);

  // and transform it to a Buffer to send in the Response
  let body: Buffer = await new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
    let buffers: Uint8Array[] = [];
    stream.on("data", (data) => {
      buffers.push(data);
    });
    stream.on("end", () => {
      resolve(Buffer.concat(buffers));
    });
    stream.on("error", reject);
  });

  // finally create the Response with the correct Content-Type header for
  // a PDF
  let headers = new Headers({ "Content-Type": "application/pdf" });
  return new Response(body, { status: 200, headers });
}

Now when the user goes to /pdf it will get the PDF file back, you could also use an iframe to show it on the HTML.


If you don't use React PDF, change the render part to use the library you are using, and keep the headers and the Response creation part.