PDFly — Private PDF Tools & Free API

Merge, split, compress and convert PDFs entirely in your browser. Your files are never uploaded. Free and open source.

Live Demo • API Docs • Features • Setup • Deploy • Contribute

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✨ Features

📝 Text to PDF

• 15 Professional Templates — Minimal, Professional, Creative, Modern, Classic, Elegant, Bold, Tech, Academic, Corporate, Artistic, Clean, Vibrant, Dark, Light
• Non-Latin scripts in the browser tool — the web app detects the script and loads a matching Noto font on demand. Devanagari (Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Nepali), Arabic script (Arabic, Persian, Urdu) and Simplified Chinese are covered today. Latin-script languages work everywhere with the built-in fonts.
  The REST API is Latin-only. It renders with the built-in Helvetica and does not embed fonts, so non-Latin text sent to the API will not render correctly. Use the browser tool for those scripts. (tracked issue)
• HTML & Markdown — Send raw HTML with CSS or plain text. Tables, headings, images, custom styles
• Batch Generation — Generate up to 5 PDFs in a single API request

🖼️ Image to PDF

• 25+ Image Formats — JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC/HEIF, TIFF, GIF, BMP, SVG, AVIF, PSD, RAW (CR2, NEF, ARW, DNG, ORF, RW2, RAF, PEF, SR2, SRW), and more
• 100+ Images Per PDF — No artificial limits on image count
• Client-Side Processing — Images never leave your device. All conversion happens in the browser
• Drag & Drop Reorder — Arrange images in any order before conversion
• Customizable Settings — Page size, orientation, fit mode, quality adjustment

🔌 REST API

• Free API Access — No credit card required
• Code Examples — JavaScript, Python, PHP, Go, cURL
• Batch Processing — Multiple documents per request
• Rate Limiting — Built-in protection with generous limits

🛠️ Tech Stack

Layer	Technology
Frontend	React 18, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui
Build	Vite 5
Auth & Database	Firebase Authentication (Google sign-in), Cloud Firestore
API	Vercel Functions (Node.js) under api/
PDF Engine	jsPDF + pdf-lib (client-side), Vercel Functions (server-side)
Image Processing	Canvas API, heic2any
Animations	Framer Motion

🚀 Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Node.js 20+ (the build scripts rely on native TypeScript stripping)
• npm or bun
• A Firebase project (Spark/free tier works) with Authentication → Google enabled and Cloud Firestore created

Note: the browser PDF tools need none of this — they run fully client-side. Firebase is only required for sign-in and API-key management.

Setup

# 1. Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/3idhMind/pdfly.git
cd pdfly

# 2. Install dependencies
npm install

# 3. Configure environment variables
cp .env.example .env
# Edit .env with your Firebase credentials

# 4. Start development server
npm run dev

The app runs at http://localhost:8080.

Environment Variables

Client (VITE_-prefixed — these are compiled into the browser bundle and are public by design; Firebase web config is not a secret, access is controlled by Firestore rules):

Variable	Required	Description
VITE_FIREBASE_API_KEY	✅	Firebase web API key
VITE_FIREBASE_AUTH_DOMAIN	✅	your-project.firebaseapp.com
VITE_FIREBASE_PROJECT_ID	✅	Firebase project ID
VITE_FIREBASE_STORAGE_BUCKET	✅	your-project.appspot.com
VITE_FIREBASE_MESSAGING_SENDER_ID	✅	Cloud Messaging sender ID
VITE_FIREBASE_APP_ID	✅	Firebase app ID
VITE_SITE_URL	❌	Primary production URL (production: https://pdfly.3idhmind.in)

Server (Vercel Functions only — real secrets, never VITE_-prefixed, set these in the Vercel dashboard, not in a committed file):

Variable	Required	Description
FIREBASE_PROJECT_ID	✅	Service-account project ID
FIREBASE_CLIENT_EMAIL	✅	Service-account email
FIREBASE_PRIVATE_KEY	✅	Service-account private key (keep the \n escapes)
PDFLY_RATE_LIMIT_PER_MIN	❌	Per-key rate limit (default in api/_lib/quota.ts)
PDFLY_FREE_TIER_MONTHLY_QUOTA	❌	Monthly free-tier quota

Database Setup

Firestore needs its rules and indexes deployed once:

npx firebase deploy --only firestore:rules,firestore:indexes

Both files (firestore.rules, firestore.indexes.json) are in the repo root.

📁 Project Structure

src/
├── assets/              # Static images
├── components/          # Reusable components
│   └── ui/              # shadcn/ui primitives
├── hooks/               # Custom React hooks
├── lib/
│   ├── firebase/        # Firebase client, auth, Firestore helpers
│   ├── routeMeta.ts     # Single source of truth for per-route SEO metadata
│   ├── imageConverter.ts # Image-to-PDF conversion logic
│   ├── clientPdfGenerator.ts # Text-to-PDF generation (browser)
│   └── utils.ts         # Utility functions
├── pages/               # Route pages
└── types/               # TypeScript types

api/                     # Vercel Functions (Node.js)
├── _lib/                # Shared: auth, API keys, quota, rate limiting
├── generate-pdf.ts      # Text/HTML to PDF API
├── images-to-pdf.ts     # Image to PDF API
├── health.ts            # Health monitoring
└── ...

scripts/
└── postbuild.mjs        # Prerenders every route + generates sitemap.xml

A note on sitemap.xml

There is no sitemap.xml file in this repository, and that is intentional. It is generated at build time by scripts/postbuild.mjs from src/lib/routeMeta.ts, and written to dist/sitemap.xml. A previously hand-maintained public/sitemap.xml drifted out of sync with the real routes; generating it removes that failure mode entirely.

To see it: run npm run build, then open dist/sitemap.xml.

Adding a route means adding it to src/lib/routeMeta.ts and src/App.tsx — the sitemap and the prerendered HTML then both pick it up with no further edits.

🌐 Deployment

Vercel (what production runs on)

1. Connect your GitHub repo to Vercel
2. Add every VITE_FIREBASE_* variable plus VITE_SITE_URL (see above)
3. Add the server secrets — FIREBASE_PROJECT_ID, FIREBASE_CLIENT_EMAIL, FIREBASE_PRIVATE_KEY — so the functions under api/ can reach Firebase Admin
4. Add your domain to Firebase → Authentication → Settings → Authorised domains, or Google sign-in will fail in production
5. Deploy. npm run build runs scripts/postbuild.mjs, which prerenders every route to a real HTML file and writes dist/sitemap.xml

Other Platforms

The static front end works on any host with SPA fallback (Netlify, Cloudflare Pages). The api/ endpoints are Vercel Functions and would need porting to that host's function runtime.

Verify prerendering with npx serve dist, not vite preview. vite preview SPA-rewrites every path, so a broken prerender still looks fine. serve checks the filesystem first, which is what Vercel does.

🔒 Security

• API keys are hashed with SHA-256 before storage; the raw key is shown once and never persisted
• Image and PDF processing in the web tools is 100% client-side — no server uploads
• api/ functions validate inputs, enforce per-key rate limits and monthly quotas
• Firestore security rules (firestore.rules) restrict every collection to its owner

See SECURITY.md for vulnerability reporting.

🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions! See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

🙏 Credits

Built by 3idhMind • Runs on Vercel & Firebase