Some news about Snappy

To begin, let's remind what Snappy is: it's an open source PHP package allowing the generation of PDF or image from a web page or HTML content directly. This package is a wrapper of wkhtmltopdf. The Snappy package has been downloaded more than 35 million times and it's frequently used in projects via bundles such as knplabs/knp-snappy-bundle for Symfony, barryvdh/laravel-snappy for Laravel or even mvlabs/mvlabs-snappy for Zend Framework.

What has changed?

Snappy hasn't evolved much in the last few years. However, although wkhtmltopdf is very stable, it's unfortunately no longer maintained and its sources have been moved to the public archive. For more information about the end of life of wkhtmltopdf, please visit the official project's page. This means that new features like, for example, recent CSS properties, will not be supported. Even worse, new security vulnerabilities might be discovered in the binary and they will not be fixed.

What's next for Snappy?

At the moment Snappy is very dependent on wkhtmltopdf and, therefore, on its evolutions. Our plan is to make Snappy evolve so that it will be able to use other rendering engines such as a headless Chrome browser. Even if it's not maintained anymore we are not planning to drop the support for wkhtmltopdf anytime soon so it will still be possible to use it.
This evolution will be the topic of a major release for Snappy.

In the meantime, feel free to participate to the ongoing discussion about Snappy's evolution.

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