Node js, piping pdfkit to a memory stream

Question

I am using pdfkit (https://github.com/devongovett/pdfkit) on my node server, typically creating pdf files, and then uploading them to s3. The problem is that pdfkit examples pip

Answer 1

An updated answer for 2020. There is no need to introduce a new memory stream because "PDFDocument instances are readable Node streams".

You can use the get-stream package to make it easy to wait for the document to finish before passing the result back to your caller. https://www.npmjs.com/package/get-stream

const PDFDocument = require('pdfkit')
const getStream = require('get-stream')

const pdf = () => {
  const doc = new PDFDocument()
  doc.text('Hello, World!')
  doc.end()
  return await getStream.buffer(doc)
}


// Caller could do this:
const pdfBuffer = await pdf()
const pdfBase64string = pdfBuffer.toString('base64')

You don't have to return a buffer if your needs are different. The get-stream readme offers other examples.