ipp-printer

Create a printer on your network using nothing but Node.js. This module implements version 1.1 of the IPP protocol and uses Bonjour to advertise a printer on your local network that anyone can print to.

This module is still work in progress!

Installation

npm install ipp-printer

Usage

var Printer = require('ipp-printer')

var printer = new Printer('My Printer')

printer.on('job', function (job) {
  var file = fs.createWriteStream('job.js')
  job.pipe(file)
})

API

new Printer([options])

The Printer object can be initialized with either the printer name as a string or an object containing:

• name - Name of the printer (defaults: Node JS)
• port - Port the printer should listen on (defaults to a random available port)
• mirrorMinor - Boolean. If true responses will mirror the minor IPP version used by the client. This shouldn't be necessary in a perfect world, but some versions of Windows doesn't like connecting to a server running a different version of the IPP protocol than it self (default: true)

Note that the IPP standard specifies port 631 as the default IPP port, but most IPP clients are fine with connecting to another port.

Event: job

function (job) {}

Emitted each time a new job is sent to the printer. The job is a readable stream of the document data being printed.

Each job object have the following attributes:

• id - The id of the job
• state - The job state
• attributes - The job attributes

Attributes example:

[
  { tag: 0x45, name: 'job-printer-uri', value: 'ipp://watson.local.:3000/' },
  { tag: 0x45, name: 'job-uri', value: 'ipp://watson.local.:3000/1' },
  { tag: 0x42, name: 'job-name', value: 'My Document Title' },
  { tag: 0x42, name: 'job-originating-user-name', value: 'watson' },
  { tag: 0x44, name: 'job-state-reasons', value: 'none' },
  { tag: 0x21, name: 'time-at-creation', value: 40 },
  { tag: 0x47, name: 'attributes-charset', value: 'utf-8' },
  { tag: 0x48, name: 'attributes-natural-language', value: 'en-us' }
]

See the ipp-encoder for an explanation of the job states and tag values.

Event: operation

function (operation) {}

Emitted each time a new IPP operation is received. This event is more low level than the job event as it will be emitted on all incoming IPP operations.

This module currently supports the minimum set of operations required by the IPP standard:

• print-job (0x02)
• validate-job (0x04)
• cancel-job (0x08)
• get-job-attribtes (0x09)
• get-jobs (0x0a)
• get-printer-attributes (0x0b)

The operation object have the following properties supplied by the printer client:

• version - An object containing the major and minor IPP version of the request (e.g. { major: 1, minor: 1 })
• operationId - The id of the IPP operation
• requestId - The id of the IPP request
• groups - An array of IPP attribute groups

See the ipp-encoder for an explanation of the different operation types.

Event: error

function (error) {}

Emitted if the IPP printer encounters an error.

printer.name

The printer name.

printer.port

The port of the printer is listening on.

printer.jobs

An array of all jobs handled by the printer.

printer.server

An instance of http.Server.

Debugging

To see the communication between the client and the server, enable debugging mode by setting the environment variable DEBUG=ipp-printer.

If you open an issue because the module crashes or if the client cannot communicate properly with the printer it helps a lot if you attach the client/server communication to the issue.

License

MIT