Why does PDFKit/wkhtmltopdf hang but renders PDF as expected when Rails app is killed?

Question

Background

After reading around it seemed to me that Prawn is out and wkhtmltopdf is in. It also seems like the PDFKit and wicked_pdf gems for Rails are the new co

Answer 1

Exact same symptoms but using WickedPdf currently. At this point, I believe the issue lies with wkhtmltopdf as well.

Unfortunately, neither of the recommendations I've been able to find in Stack/Google worked for me. Instead, I needed to combine several suggestions, including some found in this post.

Solution was:

1. brew uninstall wkhtmltopdf
2. find and delete any copies of wkhtmltopdf in /usr/bin
3. comment WickedPdf.config line in config/initializers
4. add config.threadsafe! to development.rb
5. remove middleware and allow 'show' action of main controller to handle pdf requests (may not be necessary)
6. add wkhtmltopdf-binary to gemfile
7. bundle
8. restart server
9. You may also need to add Mime::Type.register_alias "application/pdf", :pdf to config/initializers/mime_types.rb (for me, this causes 'warning: already initialized constant PDF')

My set-up was: Mac OSX Mountain Lion with Rails 3.2.1, Webrick, Postgres and wkhtmltopdf-binary (0.9.9.1).