mPDF error: Unable to create output file

Question

I am Using mPDF to generate pdf from an html.

On my localhost the pdf is generated to the located directory successfully. But not on Server, although I have open the permissions of that directory.

chmod -R 0777 /mydirectory

Found this comment from an answer and changed fopen($file_out,'wb'); to fopen($file_out,'w+'); in mpdf.php

But no success.

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Try not to modify the source. Instead, revert back to fopen($file_out,'wb'); and make sure that folder permissions are set to 0777, like you did.

Also, check if you're using the absolute path in order to write to a file, rather than using relative paths or even worse, URL.

So,

$file = "/var/www/html/mywebsite/mypdfs/myfile.pdf";

and try if it works.

Good luck!

Answer 2

I received the same error message.

The problem for me was that I was saving a file with a filename that had invalid characters.

I created this function to replace invalid characters with usable characters:

// Function to replace disallowed characters from file name.
function fixFileName($file_name) {
    // $file_name = str_replace("\\", "\\", $file_name);
    $file_name = str_replace("/", " ", $file_name);
    $file_name = str_replace(">", "\>", $file_name);
    $file_name = str_replace("<", "\<", $file_name);
    $file_name = str_replace("|", "\|", $file_name);
    $file_name = str_replace(":", "\:", $file_name);
    $file_name = str_replace("&", "\&", $file_name);
    $file_name = str_replace("(", "\(", $file_name);
    $file_name = str_replace(")", "\)", $file_name);
    $file_name = str_replace(";", "\;", $file_name);
    $file_name = str_replace("*", "\*", $file_name);
    $file_name = str_replace("?", "\?", $file_name);
    return $file_name;
}

Hope this helps if someone else runs into this issue. I wasn't sure about the backslash, so I commented it out.