PDF sidecar

The PDF sidecar is the service that Fabricate uses to render PDFs.

For information on how to deploy Fabricate, go to Deploying and managing a self-hosted instance.

This page only covers the configuration options that are used to connect Fabricate to the PDF sidecar.

PDF sidecar container option

Set the following environment variable on the PDF sidecar container:

PDF_SOCKET_PATH=  # Unix socket path to communicate between Fabricate and the PDF sidecar.

Use a path that is available to both the PDF sidecar container and the Fabricate container.

This is usually a shared Docker volume that is mounted into both containers.

Fabricate options

In .env, set the following options:

FABRICATE_PDF_SOCKET_PATH=  # Unix socket path to communicate with the PDF sidecar.
RENDER_TIMEOUT_MS=  # Timeout in milliseconds for PDF rendering.

How these options work

• FABRICATE_PDF_SOCKET_PATH — Uses a Unix socket to connect Fabricate to the PDF sidecar.

• RENDER_TIMEOUT_MS — Sets the PDF rendering timeout in milliseconds.

If you use FABRICATE_PDF_SOCKET_PATH, it should match the shared socket path used for PDF_SOCKET_PATH.

That path must be accessible to both containers.