Installing pdftk on RHEL6

A project at work required me to use the Fill PDF module for Drupal. After installation I realized I needed the pdftk package on our VM to leverage the power of the module. Since we have the VM there is no need to use the service option.

Searching for the package with yum did not turn anything up. I did find the package at repoforge.org. We are running a 64bit install so we needed the 64bit RPM. Here are the steps to install.

$wget http://pkgs.repoforge.org/pdftk/pdftk-1.44-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm -K –nosignature pdftk-1.44-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm
sudo yum install jre-gcj
sudo rpm -Uvh pdftk-1.44-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm
$PATH
which pdftk

First we download the package and check that it a complete package with rpm -K –nosignature command. Then we install the dependency jre-gcj which is a Java Runtime Environment compiler. Next, we install the package using the update -U flag. Run $PATH to list our path and run the which command to verify it is installed in our path.

After that the Fill PDF module detects pdftk is installed and life is good.

RedHat’s documentation on RPMs was fantastic and a big help in making sure this went smoothly.

3 thoughts on “Installing pdftk on RHEL6

  1. Thank you… for some reason it let me install pdftk without jre-gcj and it was throwing unhandled exceptions without a description when I tried to password protect a PDF. There was literally nothing to go off of, just an empty exception. I installed jre-gcj and poof, everything works like magic. Thank you for covering this subject.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *