OpenPrinting Website

The official website for OpenPrinting, built with Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and Framer Motion.

OpenPrinting is a Linux Foundation workgroup that manages the printing architecture for Linux and UNIX-like operating systems.

Getting Started

You need Node.js and Yarn. Note that the Yarn command-line tool is packaged under two different names depending on your distribution: it is sometimes called yarn and sometimes yarnpkg (for example on Debian/Ubuntu, where the yarn name historically belonged to an unrelated package). If yarn is not found, try yarnpkg instead — wherever this README uses yarn, substitute yarnpkg if that is how it is installed on your system.

Debian / Ubuntu

Install Node.js and Yarn from the distribution repositories:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nodejs npm yarnpkg

On Debian/Ubuntu the Yarn binary is installed as yarnpkg (the yarn name is used by a different package), so use yarnpkg in place of yarn in the commands below.

This project pins Yarn 4 via the packageManager field in package.json. The distribution package is the older Yarn 1, which is only used to bootstrap; the pinned version is fetched automatically on first use. If you prefer to enable the modern Yarn directly, run corepack enable (Corepack ships with Node.js).

Install and run

Install the dependencies:

yarn install

Start the development server:

yarn dev

Open http://localhost:3000 with your browser to see the result.

Important: yarn dev does not generate the build-time data. The Foomatic printer/driver database (under public/foomatic-db/) and the search indexes are produced by yarn build (which runs yarn generate). Run yarn build — or just yarn generate — at least once so that the printer/driver lookup and site search work locally. See Generating build-time data below.

Note: running yarn install (especially when bootstrapping with the system's Yarn 1) may modify yarn.lock. See A note on yarn.lock below before you run further git commands.

Project Structure

• app/ - Next.js App Router containing pages and layouts.
• components/ - Reusable UI components.
• contents/ - Markdown content representing news, blogs, and documentation.
• lib/ - Utility functions and shared library code.
• scripts/ - Build scripts, such as search index generation.
• public/ - Static files and assets.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please open an issue or submit a pull request if you find a bug or want to propose an enhancement.

When making UI changes, please follow the existing Tailwind CSS design patterns.

Deployment

This project is meant to be deployed statically on GitHub Pages. Note that Next.js is configured for static export in this repository.

To build the static export locally:

yarn build

This will generate an out/ directory containing the static HTML/CSS/JS files which are then hosted on GitHub Pages.

Generating build-time data

Several parts of the site are generated data, not source, and yarn build is required to produce them. The build runs yarn generate first, which:

• converts the upstream foomatic-db data into JSON and statically generates a page for every printer and driver (output under public/foomatic-db/),
• generates the machine-readable query API and PPD files (output under public/query/ and public/ppds/; see Machine-readable query API),
• builds the client-side search indexes (public/search/static-index.json and public/search/foomatic-index.json), and
• generates the RSS feed (public/feed.xml).

yarn dev / next dev alone does not produce any of this. So if you want the Foomatic printer/driver lookup and the site search to work locally, you must run yarn build — or just the data step on its own:

yarn generate

at least once. These outputs are git-ignored and regenerated on every build (see Deployment), so you do not commit them.

Machine-readable query API and PPD downloads

The legacy OpenPrinting site exposed two machine interfaces: query.php (database lookups) and ppd-o-matic.php (PPD downloads). The site is now a fully static export hosted on GitHub Pages — there is no PHP/CGI or any other server-side code. This has one hard consequence worth understanding:

A static host serves the same file for a URL regardless of its query string. So query.php?type=printer&make=HP and query.php?type=printer&make=Canon are the same request as far as the host is concerned. The legacy *.php?… pages therefore resolve the query in the browser with JavaScript and work when opened in a browser, but a client that does not run JavaScript (wget, curl, and printer-setup tools such as CUPS or the GNOME Control Center) cannot get query-dependent output from them.

For all non-browser/automation use, fetch the static endpoints below directly. They are plain files, so they work with wget/curl and any HTTP client, and they carry the correct content type. Append .xml instead of .txt for XML; the PPD files are served as application/vnd.cups-ppd.

Legacy URL (browser only)	Static endpoint (works everywhere)
query.php?type=makes	/query/makes.txt
query.php?type=printer	/query/printers.txt
query.php?type=printer&make=HP	/query/printers/HP.txt
query.php?type=driver	/query/drivers.txt
query.php?type=driver&printer=printer/HP-LaserJet_4050 query.php?type=driver&make=HP&model=HP-LaserJet_4050	/query/drivers/HP-LaserJet_4050.txt
ppd-o-matic.php?printer=Alps-MD-2010&driver=ppmtomd	/ppds/Alps-MD-2010-ppmtomd.ppd

The driver lists are keyed by printer id (<make>-<model> with spaces as underscores, e.g. HP-LaserJet_4050), and PPD files are named <printer-id>-<driver>.ppd. A machine- readable index of all printers (id, make, model, command sets) is at /query/index.json.

Example:

wget -O HP.txt        'https://openprinting.github.io/query/printers/HP.txt'
wget -O 4050.txt      'https://openprinting.github.io/query/drivers/HP-LaserJet_4050.txt'
wget -O printer.ppd   'https://openprinting.github.io/ppds/Alps-MD-2010-ppmtomd.ppd'

Two original query.php features have no static equivalent because they require computation at request time and cannot be precomputed into files:

• Fuzzy device-ID matching (printer=MFG:…;MDL:…;) — works in the browser only.
• papps=true (the Printer-Application look-up) — depended on live Printer Application Snaps running on the old server; it is not part of the static database export.

A note on yarn.lock

Installing dependencies or building can modify yarn.lock (for instance when the system's Yarn 1 is used to bootstrap the pinned Yarn 4). These local changes are not meant to be committed. Before running further git actions (git pull, git commit, git checkout, ...), discard them.

To reset just this one file to the committed version:

git checkout -- yarn.lock

Or, if you have other local changes you want to keep temporarily, stash everything first:

git stash

Naming Conventions

• Route files follow Next.js App Router conventions.
• Reusable React component filenames should converge on a single convention over time.
• In this pass, existing mixed naming is preserved unless a touched area needs cleanup to stay consistent.