How to Generate a PDF from JSON in Node.js (without a headless browser) (opens in new tab)

If you've ever had to generate PDFs from a Node app — invoices, receipts, reports, certificates — you've probably reached for Puppeteer or some headless-Chrome setup. It works… until you have to run it in production. Now you're shipping a 300MB Chromium binary, babysitting a browser process, fighting memory leaks, and your "render a PDF" endpoint times out under load. There's a simpler way: describe the document as JSON, POST it to an API, get a PDF back. No browser. In this post I'll show ho...