Free iLovePDF Alternative — Self-Hosted PDF Tools PHP Script (PdfZip)

PdfZip is an iLovePDF-style toolbox that runs entirely on your own server. Eighteen tools out of the box: Merge, Split (every page or a range), Extract pages, Remove pages, Rotate, Compress (three quality presets), Grayscale, PDF→JPG, Images→PDF, PDF→Text, Word→PDF, Excel→PDF, PowerPoint→PDF, PDF→Word (editable DOCX), Watermark, Page numbers, Protect (real AES-256 encryption) and Unlock. The four Office converters ride on LibreOffice and light up automatically when it is installed — everything else needs only qpdf, Ghostscript and Poppler.

There is no AI, no third-party API and no per-file fee anywhere in the pipeline. The heavy lifting is done by the same free, battle-tested engines the big PDF sites are built on — qpdf, Ghostscript and Poppler — installed with a single apt line. The script detects which engines exist and shows only the tools that will actually work; the admin panel has a live engine-status table, so "why is this tool missing?" is never a mystery.

Privacy is the selling point the hosted services can't match: every job runs in a random 32-hex workspace, downloads only work through tokenized URLs, and everything is deleted automatically after a configurable retention window (plus a one-click purge button). No accounts, no upload history, nothing leaves the box.

The admin panel controls all of it: file-size and files-per-job limits, per-IP hourly rate limit, auto-delete time, tool toggles, site name/tagline/footer, an analytics snippet slot, a 30-day jobs chart with per-tool counts and errors, and recent-job logs. Two pieces are pure PHP with no library at all: the Images→PDF converter writes the PDF objects itself (JPEG pass-through, so no recompression), and the Watermark/Page-numbers tools generate an overlay PDF in PHP that qpdf stamps over every page.

Since launch it also grew an SEO layer and a blog, both admin-managed: every tool page gets its own editable title, meta description and an intro text block (HTML allowed) with sensible defaults when left empty, and the built-in blog (posts with slugs, meta descriptions, draft/publish states) lets the site rank for how-to searches that feed the tools. Asset URLs are version-stamped so CDN caches never serve stale CSS or JS after an update.

Feature	PdfZip (self-hosted)	Hosted PDF services
Where your files go	They never leave your server; auto-deleted after a window you control	Uploaded to third-party cloud, retention per their policy
Free tier limits	None — you set size/rate limits yourself	File size, tasks/day and queue caps designed to sell Premium
Cost at any volume	Server you already have + free engines (qpdf, Ghostscript, Poppler)	Monthly subscription per user
Merge, split, extract, remove, rotate	✓	✓
Compress (3 presets) + Grayscale	✓	✓ (compression levels often Premium)
PDF→JPG, Images→PDF, PDF→Text	✓ — Images→PDF is pure PHP, JPEG pass-through	✓
Watermark + page numbers	✓ — generated in PHP, stamped with qpdf	✓ (often Premium)
Protect / Unlock	✓ AES-256 via qpdf	✓
Word / Excel / PowerPoint → PDF and PDF → Word	✓ via LibreOffice — appears automatically when installed	✓ (PDF→Word usually Premium)
White-label + your own ads/analytics	✓ — name, tagline, footer, head snippet from admin	—
Rate limiting & abuse control	✓ per-IP hourly limit, size caps, tool toggles	Their rules, not yours

1. Upload everything and point the domain — or any subfolder — at the project root. The included .htaccess forwards to public/ and subfolder installs are handled automatically.

2. Install the engines if the server doesn't have them: apt install qpdf ghostscript poppler-utils (about 50 MB total). Tools appear and disappear automatically based on what's installed.

3. Open https://yourdomain/install/, enter database and admin details. Done — the tool grid is live immediately.

4. Visit /admin for everything else: size and rate limits, auto-delete window, tool toggles, branding, analytics snippet, engine status, stats and the purge button.

The brief: "an iLovePDF-style free PDF converter — can we do it with zero cost?" The answer shaped the whole build: yes, because iLovePDF-class functionality doesn't need a SaaS — it needs qpdf, Ghostscript and Poppler, which are free, in every distro repo, and better tested than any PHP PDF library.

Architecture: one registry file describes every tool — name, category, accepted file types, options schema, required engine, handler function — and the whole product hangs off it: the landing grid, the tool pages, the option forms, the admin toggles and the API validation are all generated from that single table. Adding a tool is ~15 lines. Engines are probed at runtime (command -v + version), so the same zip works on a bare VPS (images→PDF still works — it's pure PHP) and on a full server where Office→PDF appears by itself.

Two things had to be written from scratch because "no Composer, no libraries" is the series rule: an Images→PDF writer that embeds JPEGs by pass-through (DCTDecode — no recompression, PNG/WEBP flattened to JPEG via GD), and an overlay generator for Watermark/Page numbers that emits a real PDF (Helvetica, ExtGState opacity, rotation matrix) which qpdf then stamps over every page with --overlay. Both produce files that pass qpdf --check.

Security model: uploads are renamed to server-generated names (f1.pdf…) before any shell command sees them, every argument goes through escapeshellarg, jobs live in random 32-hex workspaces, downloads only resolve through tokenized URLs with a realpath containment check, per-IP hourly rate limiting, and lazy cleanup wipes expired workspaces on every request.

What testing actually caught:
1. The subfolder install was dead on arrival — the root .htaccess checked REQUEST_URI, which contains the /demo/pdfzip prefix, so the installer 404'd. Rewrote the forward rule with a per-directory negative lookahead (^(?!public/|install/)). The same latent bug existed in the previous product and had gone unnoticed because its installer was only ever run from the CLI test rig.
2. Protect/Unlock round-trip: encrypted with AES-256, confirmed qpdf itself refuses the file without the password, unlocked it back, and confirmed a wrong password returns a clean "Wrong password" instead of a raw engine dump.
3. Rendered the outputs headlessly and eyeballed them: the diagonal CONFIDENTIAL watermark, the "2 / 3" footer numbers and the A4-centered image page all rendered exactly as intended — worth doing, because pdftotext can't "see" Ghostscript-subset fonts, so text-based assertions alone would have false-failed.
4. Compression on an already-tiny PDF made it bigger, which looks broken to a user — added a guard that returns the original when Ghostscript can't beat it.

5. The Office converters died with a baffling "No such file or directory" — timeout 170 HOME=/x soffice… treats the env assignment as the command name. Wrapping it as timeout … env HOME=… soffice fixed all four tools at once.

Round two (same day): added Word→PDF, Excel→PDF and PowerPoint→PDF as separate tools plus PDF→Word via LibreOffice's writer_pdf_import filter — verified by converting a PDF and finding its exact text inside the resulting DOCX's document.xml. LibreOffice serializes through a lock file since it refuses concurrent instances. The live demo also got demo-appropriate limits (5 MB, 5 files, 10 jobs/hour, 30-minute retention) while the download stays unrestricted.

Round three (user testing): a real visitor's screenshot showed "Uploading…" spinning forever. The upload wasn't stuck — it had never started: .progress { display:flex } silently defeats the HTML hidden attribute, so the spinner had been visible since page load. Same bug class as the editor panel in the previous product — that's twice, so [hidden]{display:none!important} is now a permanent line in the base stylesheet, not a spot fix. Two more things fell out of the same session: the server's php.ini still had the stock 2 MB upload_max_filesize, quietly undercutting the app's advertised limits; and the fixed CSS didn't reach browsers because the CDN edge kept serving the cached old file — assets now carry a filemtime version query so every deploy busts the cache by itself. Then the feature round: per-tool SEO (title, meta description, HTML intro under each tool) and a small blog, both managed from the admin panel.

Verification: all 18 tools exercised end-to-end through the real HTTP API (18 files, ~1.4k lines, every PHP file linted), invalid-file and path-traversal attempts rejected, admin write-block in demo mode confirmed against the database.