cosminadrianpopescu / cups-client

Simple CUPS client for Android devices

Cups Client

This is a simple client to connect to a CUPS server to print documents. It can run on Android devices or as a standalone PWA application.

I've search a lot of time for a decent CUPS client, and since I couldn't find one, I've developed this one.

For example, CUPS Printing will try to install the printers locally. I've also used JfCupsPrint, but also it installs the printers locally.

This application is just a client. This means that all the printer administration (available printers, default options, jobs handling etc.) is done on the CUPS server. This will just connect to the server, display the available printers and will send documents to them.

The communication with the server is made using the IPP protocol. The javascript implementation is based on the node ipp library that I heavily modified. This is MIT licensed. The rest of the code is GPL 3.0 licensed.

Installation

You can download the latest release from the releases page and install it, or you can build it.

Building

git clone https://github.com/cosminadrianpopescu/cups-client
cd cups-client
npm install
ionic build --prod
npx cap add android
cp ./AndroidManifest.xml ./android/app/src/main/
npx cap copy
node ./resources/resources.js
cd android
./gradlew assembleRelease

After this you'll find the apk in android/app/build/outputs/apk/release/app-release-unsigned.apk. You need to sign this file before installing, like shown here:

cd ./app/build/outputs/apk/release/
keytool -genkey -v -keystore my-release-key.keystore -alias cups-client -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000
mv app-release-unsigned.apk cups.client.apk
jarsigner -sigalg SHA1withRSA -digestalg SHA1 -keystore my-release-key.keystore cups.client.apk cups-client

Please note that the Cordova HTTP plugin has a default timeout on connections of 30 seconds. I've modified manually in the code of the plugin this timeout to the timeout indicated in the options of the javascript remote call. The problem is that if you cannot connect to the CUPS server, it takes 30 seconds until you get an error message.