Document generator on the OpenSource stack

CarboneJS for document generation, Minio as an object storage server and NodeJS as a runtime environment. Let's start!

What will we get?

REST API to which you can send a request to generate a document with a data model using a previously loaded template and in response we will receive a generated document.

We could have ended there, but we will go further and bring this idea to life.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have the following programs installed on your machine:

You will also need to clone the repository from GitHub. You can do this by running the command git clone https://github.com/your-repo/document-generator.git in the terminal.

Installation

To install, you need to clone the repository and install all dependencies using npm or yarn.

git clone https://github.com/nikolay-kochubashev/documentGenerator
cd documentGenerator
npm install

Launch

You can start the application using the npm start or yarn start command.

npm start

Deploying minio

Minio is a high-performance distributed object store. You can use Docker to install and run it. Here is an example command to run Minio in Docker:

docker run -p 9000:9000 --name minio1 \
  -e "MINIO_ACCESS_KEY=your-access-key" \
  -e "MINIO_SECRET_KEY=your-secret-key" \
  minio/minio server /data

Once launched, Minio will be available at http://localhost:9090 .

To work with Minio from the application, you need to install and configure the Minio client. Client configuration example:

javascript
const Minio = require('minio')

const minioClient = new Minio.Client({
    endPoint: 'localhost',
    port: 9000,
    useSSL: false,
    accessKey: 'your-access-key',
    secretKey: 'your-secret-key'
});

Usage

Once the application is installed and launched, you can start using it to create documents. An example of use is given in the application code.

Add access keys

Go to http://localhost:9090/access-keys and generate the keys. Add these keys to your Nodejs code in App.js as shown above.

Add new bucket

Go to http://localhost:9090 / and add a new bucket, for example “general-templates”

Download template

Upload a new document from the “complicated.docx” repository

Send a request via Postman

Enter “localhost:3005/api/render/general-templates/complicated.docx”

Save the answer as a file and you can see the result

You did it!

Conclusion

That's all! You now have a basic document generation application running using CarboneJS, Minio and NodeJS. This is a simple example, but can easily be extended to meet more complex needs.

I hope this guide was helpful. Happy coding!

about the author

My name is Nikolay Kochubashev, I am a solution and application architect in a large company in Kazakhstan. I specialize in low-code solutions and platform engineering.
https://solution-architect.kz https://low-code.kz
Join my blog in the telegram channel in Russian https://t.me/architectkz