Generate a PDF in GitHub Actions

Setup: one secret

Create a free API key at /signup and store it in the repository under Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions → New repository secret as PAPERTYPE_API_KEY. Never put the key in the workflow file itself; forks and logs would expose it.

Release notes PDF attached to every release

The step below runs when a release is published, renders CHANGELOG.md with a cover page and a contents page, and uploads the PDF to the release. jq is preinstalled on GitHub-hosted runners and builds the JSON body from the file so quotes and newlines are escaped correctly.

name: Release PDF
on:
  release:
    types: [published]

jobs:
  pdf:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: write   # upload the asset
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Render CHANGELOG.md to PDF
        env:
          PAPERTYPE_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.PAPERTYPE_API_KEY }}
        run: |
          jq -n --rawfile md CHANGELOG.md \
            --arg title "Release notes ${{ github.ref_name }}" \
            --arg footer "${{ github.repository }} · ${{ github.ref_name }}" \
            '{markdown: $md, title: $title, footer: $footer, theme: "report", cover: true, toc: true}' \
          | curl --fail-with-body -sS -X POST https://papertype.dev/v1/pdf \
              -H "Authorization: Bearer $PAPERTYPE_API_KEY" \
              -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
              --data-binary @- -o release-notes.pdf

      - uses: softprops/action-gh-release@v2
        with:
          files: release-notes.pdf

--fail-with-body makes the step fail on a 4xx or 5xx and prints the JSON error, so a quota or a rendering problem stops the job instead of attaching an empty file.

Docs as a workflow artifact on every push

For a PDF you want to download from the run page rather than publish, upload it as an artifact. The same render step applies; only the trigger and the last step change.

on:
  push:
    paths: ["docs/**"]

jobs:
  handbook:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Render docs/handbook.md
        env:
          PAPERTYPE_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.PAPERTYPE_API_KEY }}
        run: |
          jq -n --rawfile md docs/handbook.md '{markdown: $md, theme: "clean", toc: true, page_size: "Letter"}' \
          | curl --fail-with-body -sS -X POST https://papertype.dev/v1/pdf \
              -H "Authorization: Bearer $PAPERTYPE_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
              --data-binary @- -o handbook.pdf
      - uses: actions/upload-artifact@v4
        with:
          name: handbook
          path: handbook.pdf

Several Markdown files? Concatenate them first (cat docs/*.md > all.md) and render once, with a ## heading per file so the contents page lists them.

Invoice or certificate from JSON

The hosted templates take a JSON object instead of Markdown, which suits workflows that already produce structured data. Fields are listed on /templates/invoice, /templates/certificate and /templates/report.

      - name: Render invoice
        env:
          PAPERTYPE_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.PAPERTYPE_API_KEY }}
        run: |
          jq -n --slurpfile d billing/invoice-1042.json '{template: "invoice", data: $d[0]}' \
          | curl --fail-with-body -sS -X POST https://papertype.dev/v1/pdf \
              -H "Authorization: Bearer $PAPERTYPE_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
              --data-binary @- -o invoice-1042.pdf

Limits that matter in CI

• Badges and remote images. The renderer has no network access. Images, fonts and stylesheets at external URLs are never fetched; inline them as data: URIs. A request that references an external URL fails with a 422 that names the URL, rather than silently dropping the asset. READMEs and changelogs often start with badge lines; strip them with grep -v '^\[!\[' or sed before rendering.
• Relative image paths (docs/arch.png) cannot be resolved by the renderer. Inline the file as a data: URI in a preprocessing step, or drop the image.
• 2 MB of source per request, 300 pages per document, 2 concurrent renders per account.
• Quota. Free-plan output carries a small papertype.dev footer mark. Paid plans (from $9/month) do not. A workflow that renders on every push can exhaust the free plan's 50 documents; trigger on releases or tags, or filter on paths. The response headers X-Quota-Used and X-Quota-Limit show where you stand.
• No JavaScript is executed. Send the final HTML; anything a script would have drawn or filled in will not appear.

Related

• README to PDF
• Markdown to PDF API
• Generate invoice PDFs from JSON
• PDF generation in Python