Statically compile pdftk for Heroku. Need to split PDF into single page files

Question

So we\'re using heroku to host our rails application. We\'ve moved to the cedar stack. This stack does not have the pdftk library installed. I contacted support and was told to

Answer 1

We've encountered the same problem, the solution we came up with was to use Stapler instead https://github.com/hellerbarde/stapler, it's a python utility and only requires an extra module to be installed (pyPdf) on Heroku.

I've been oriented to this blog entry: http://theprogrammingbutler.com/blog/archives/2011/07/28/running-pdftotext-on-heroku/

Here are the steps I followed to install pyPdf:

Accessing the heroku bash console

heroku run bash

Installing the latest version of pyPdf

cd tmp
curl http://pybrary.net/pyPdf/pyPdf-1.13.tar.gz -o pyPdf-1.13.tar.gz
tar zxvf pyPdf-1.13.tar.gz
python setup.py install --user

This puts all the necessary files under a .local file at the root of the app. I just downloaded it and added it to our git repo, as well as the stapler utility. Finally I updated my code to use stapler instead of pdftk, et voilà! Splitting PDFs from Heroku again.

Another way, probably cleaner, would be to encapsulate it in a gem ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2816783 )