Use PDF in Azure App Service e.g. IronPDF
Issue
· I am using some
PDF class library which is working fine in local but not working after
deploying to Azure App Service?
· It fails with
HTTP 500 exception
· How can I generate
PDF In azure app service application?
· e.g. IronPDF
Solution:
This is very
common issue. To understand this in details first we should know how does Azure
App Service works.
All Azure Web
Apps (as well as Mobile App/Services, WebJobs and Functions) run in a secure
environment called a sandbox.
Each app runs inside its own sandbox, isolating
its execution from other instances on the same machine as well as providing an additional degree of security and privacy which would otherwise not be
available
If you read more
about Sandbox in above URL then you will see that,
There are
multiple libraries used to convert HTML to PDF. Many Windows/.NET specific
versions leverage IE APIs and therefore leverage User32/GDI32 extensively.
These APIs are largely blocked in the sandbox (regardless of plan) and
therefore these frameworks do not work in the sandbox.
There are some
frameworks that do not leverage User32/GDI32 extensively (wkhtmltopdf,
for example) and we are working on enabling these in Basic+ the same way we
enabled SQL Reporting.
I am taking example of IronPDF here which is mostly
used PDF library.
If you decompile it you will see references to a Chrome Engine
and user32.dll and gdi32.dll.
This is one of the prime reason which was preventing
your code to generate the Pdf while in local it was working fine.
How to solve this then?
One possibility is to use Windows Containers on App
Service.
You can get more information on below URL,
For more info, this is the announcement:
Similarly if you want to use Excel in Azure App service
you have to install it’s provider which is not supported but you have
workaround which you can find in below URL,https://azureappservices.blogspot.com/2019/07/use-excel-in-azure-app-service-or-web.html
