Convert documents to PDF using LibreOffice

import LocalDevelopment from "/snippets/local-development-extensions.mdx";

Prerequisites

A project with Trigger.dev initialized
LibreOffice installed on your machine
A Cloudflare R2 account and bucket

Using our `aptGet` build extension to add the LibreOffice package

To deploy this task, you'll need to add LibreOffice to your project configuration, like this:

import { aptGet } from "@trigger.dev/build/extensions/core";
import { defineConfig } from "@trigger.dev/sdk";

export default defineConfig({
  project: "<project ref>",
  // Your other config settings...
  build: {
    extensions: [
      aptGet({
        packages: ["libreoffice"],
      }),
    ],
  },
});

<Note> [Build extensions](/config/extensions/overview) allow you to hook into the build system and customize the build process or the resulting bundle and container image (in the case of deploying). You can use pre-built extensions or create your own. </Note>

You'll also need to add @trigger.dev/build to your package.json file under devDependencies if you don't already have it there.

Convert a document to PDF using LibreOffice and upload to R2

This task demonstrates how to use LibreOffice to convert a document (.doc or .docx) to PDF and upload the PDF to an R2 storage bucket.

Key Features

Fetches a document from a given URL
Converts the document to PDF
Uploads the PDF to R2 storage

Task code

import { PutObjectCommand, S3Client } from "@aws-sdk/client-s3";
import { task } from "@trigger.dev/sdk";
import libreoffice from "libreoffice-convert";
import { promisify } from "node:util";
import path from "path";
import fs from "fs";

const convert = promisify(libreoffice.convert);

// Initialize S3 client
const s3Client = new S3Client({
  // How to authenticate to R2: https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/api/s3/tokens/
  region: "auto",
  endpoint: process.env.R2_ENDPOINT,
  credentials: {
    accessKeyId: process.env.R2_ACCESS_KEY_ID ?? "",
    secretAccessKey: process.env.R2_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY ?? "",
  },
});

export const libreOfficePdfConvert = task({
  id: "libreoffice-pdf-convert",
  run: async (payload: { documentUrl: string }, { ctx }) => {
    // Set LibreOffice path for production environment
    if (ctx.environment.type !== "DEVELOPMENT") {
      process.env.LIBREOFFICE_PATH = "/usr/bin/libreoffice";
    }

    try {
      // Create temporary file paths
      const inputPath = path.join(process.cwd(), `input_${Date.now()}.docx`);
      const outputPath = path.join(process.cwd(), `output_${Date.now()}.pdf`);

      // Download file from URL
      const response = await fetch(payload.documentUrl);
      const buffer = Buffer.from(await response.arrayBuffer());
      fs.writeFileSync(inputPath, buffer);

      const inputFile = fs.readFileSync(inputPath);
      // Convert to PDF using LibreOffice
      const pdfBuffer = await convert(inputFile, ".pdf", undefined);
      fs.writeFileSync(outputPath, pdfBuffer);

      // Upload to R2
      const key = `converted-pdfs/output_${Date.now()}.pdf`;
      await s3Client.send(
        new PutObjectCommand({
          Bucket: process.env.R2_BUCKET,
          Key: key,
          Body: fs.readFileSync(outputPath),
        })
      );

      // Cleanup temporary files
      fs.unlinkSync(inputPath);
      fs.unlinkSync(outputPath);

      return { pdfLocation: key };
    } catch (error) {
      console.error("Error converting PDF:", error);
      throw error;
    }
  },
});

Testing your task

To test this task, use this payload structure:

json

{
  "documentUrl": "<a-document-url>" // Replace <a-document-url> with the URL of the document you want to convert
}