that-one-tom / pdftable-api

A simple REST API accepting PDF files and returning table data as JSON

pdftable-api

A simple REST API accepting PDF files and returning table data as JSON built on top of pdf-table-extractor

I wanted to play around with Docker a bit and figured this would be a good first step to learn how to build and dockerize a Node.js application. You probably shouldn't use this in anything serious.

Build & run

1. Clone the repository: git clone [email protected]:that-one-tom/pdftable-api.git
2. Change into the newly created directory: cd pdftable-api
3. Build the Docker image: docker build --tag that-one-tom/pdftable-api .
4. Run it: docker run -p 9010:8080 -d that-one-tom/pdftable-api (Replace 9010 with the port you want the app to be available under)

Usage

Send the file in a multipart form POST request to the /upload endpoint using the field name file:

Use Case

I am currently using this in my n8n environment to read and parse numeric data published by my local county council (who themselves don't provide data through easily machine-readable files or an API but upload PDF files generated using Microsoft Word).

My n8n workflow first stores new PDFs it finds, uploads them to this REST API and then transforms and stores the extracted data:

There are a couple of commercial solutions providing a REST API for this particular data parsing job too. However, I found they neither were a good fit for n8n environments because they don't work synchronously or are too expensive.