Yeah, I'm really hoping to not require us to run an entire browser or depend on an external service to generate PDFs. The approaches I found in my research were:

Just my two cents here, but chrome has an headless mode that allows to "print to pdf" : https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-chrome

When I apt-get install wkhtmltopdf (or something like that) on aux001, which is Ubuntu 14, I get this:

I've worked with wkhtmltopdf several times, and I don't remember it actually requiring any special setup - in all cases, I basically dropped the binary in the machine (Although it's possible all my machines had X11 built in for some reason? I've never intentionally installed X11).

Just some observations after popping open PDF invoices which have shown up in my inbox recently:

See PHI1367, which featured a specific case where git repack unambiguously did something good instead of being magic fairy dust that we sprinkle around to ward off demons.

This is also more "while I'm here", but there's no web UI way to void an invoice right now. It would be nice to have a "Void Invoice" button for staff instead of requiring database fiddling, since this comes up occasionally.

Per T13366, I'm just going to get rid of this behavior for now, with the expectation that we'll soon begin generating side-channel emails for "Billing Department Email Address" under the umbrella of T8389 and could put "Merchant Emails" on a similar channel if we want.

See also https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T197935.

$info_object = new PhabricatorPDFInfoObject();

PDF files appear to consist of a series of objects that (mostly) look like this:

See T13357 for followup.

This is likely straightforward.

See also PHI1358, which is an actual concrete request for sensible relabeling of "Description" in a subtype.

There's currently a bug (likely related to D20652 or D20654?) where normal edits aren't respecting card order correctly during the redraw. I suspect this is just an order parameter getting lost somewhere.

Everything has made it to master now so I suspect we're in good shape here.

Adjusting log_warnings = 2 in production (to get connection aborts into the error log) is also possibly desirable, although the background level of connection abortions (general network flakiness, server restarts during deploy, wait_timeout on very long-running demons?) may be high enough that this is more noise than signal.

To reproduce this easily:

We could also consider these things:

So actual actionable stuff here is:

Bumping max_allowed_packet to 1G in the server config resolved things. The export process then spent a long time doing a bin/files migration (which could use a progress bar, maybe) and is now doing a dump (which could too, although I'm less sure of how we'd build one).

I adjusted innodb_log_file_size to 1GB and attempted the import again, but ran into the same issue.