323 thoughts on “CUPS Cloud Print”

1. Fantastic! Been scratching my head and googling this all afternoon, then I find your solution and everything is right with the world again 🙂

2. Hi Simon
   try to find a solution to use your software through a proxy server…
   Do you have any idea?
   Thanks

3. Hi Simon
   Is it possible to send to Google Cloud Print a PCL file without conversion?

   Thanks

4. Hi Pierre-Yves,

   I have an open Github issue to investigate proxy issues ( here ), but I haven’t looked at it in a while – the last time I checked using a transparent proxy worked fine ( eg where all HTTPS traffic is transparently sent via the proxy ), but there was no simple way to configure CUPS backends with a proxy.

   Simon

5. Hi Pierre-Yves,

   According to the Google Cloud Print API documentation only a few filetypes are supported directly across all printers ( pdf, jpeg and png ), however it does mention that filetypes that an individual printer supports directly can be accepted by Google Cloud Print. I’ll look at making changes to CUPS Cloud Print to allow printing of extra filetypes without conversion that the printer claims to support.

   Thanks

   Simon

6. I really needed this….. I am setting up some mint machines to use in charity run support program for expelled k12 students. This program hopes to minimize the academic impact of missing school for these challenged students. Since the school system has decreed Google Docs as the basic IT for all student and facility, these old XP machines have been given new life with the newly installed Mint with remote printing capability.
   thanks again…….

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8. Hi,

   I posted this on the bugs/request page, but in looking around the site it looks like I should have posted it here.

   I installed Cups Cloud Print on 1 computer at the office last night. It found and installed all of the cloud printers I have. I had it set to find all printers automatically. I have Epson WP-4530 printers at home, at the office, and at our church. It found all of those plus others. Each is individually named in Google Cloud Print. I tried installing this on a second computer at the office today. Since in the first install I had many printers in I didn’t want I selected to do the manual install. It did install the Epson WP-4530, but didn’t specify which of the three it installed. When trying to print, it says it printed successfully, but It isn’t coming to the printer here in the office. I don’t know where it is going. I tried uninstalling and purging cupscloudprint, then reinstalling. Even with automatic install selected, it is still not finding the individual printers, but just gives me the one Epson selection which seems to not be related any of the three in Google cloud Print. I ran the script to delete the account and associated printers, and then did a new install of that account. It still doesn’t give me the individual list of the three Epson printers as they are in my Google account. I’m beginning to think that it isn’t seeing all of them. Maybe the cupscloudprint will only work on one computer. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

9. Hello,

   Using Brother printer MFC-J870DW cloud ready printer. Printer works fine using Acer 720 chromebook and when printing google docs etc. Also have Ubuntu 12.04 on Acer and operates on internet perfectly.

   However cannot print using Ubuntu at this time. Message in Ubuntu is: “failed to connect to server” “printing service not available – start the service or connect to another server”

   In the terminal, using: sudo system-config-printer, I get the message “Failed to load module unity-gtk-module”

   Questions:

   Although I think the problem is between Unity and Google cloud, in Ubuntu, where should the print driver for this Brother printer be located in the terminal?

   Secondly, from the comments, Ubuntu 10.04 package will work with Ubuntu 12.04. Is this a valid assumption?

   Regards
   Bill

10. Hi Simon

    I get the following when trying to install to a Linux Mint 16

    W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/simon-cadman/niftyrepo/ubuntu/dists/saucy/main/source/Sources 404 Not Found

    W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/simon-cadman/niftyrepo/ubuntu/dists/saucy/main/binary-amd64/Packages 404 Not Found

    W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/simon-cadman/niftyrepo/ubuntu/dists/saucy/main/binary-i386/Packages 404 Not Found

    E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

    These repositories are not found despite a few attempts at trying to reinstall

    Advice welcome

    Cheers

    Joe Rice

11. Hi Joe,

    It looks like Mint 16 is based on Ubuntu Saucy ( 13.10 ), which is no longer supported, and so I can’t add PPA repositories for that version of Ubuntu or Mint.

    You should probably upgrade to a later OS version at some point to make sure you get security patches etc, but for now you can fix that error by replacing ‘saucy’ with ‘trusty’ in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/simon-cadman-niftyrepo-saucy.list , and then running ‘sudo apt-get update’.

    Hope this helps

    Simon

12. Hi Bill,

    That error sounds like CUPS isn’t running, can you try running ‘sudo service cups restart’ in a terminal? It should restart the CUPS service, or at least hopefully give an error to explain why CUPS isn’t running ( the logs in /var/log/cups/ may also help ).

    The “Failed to load module unity-gtk-module” message may be because you are missing some packages ( this thread looks to be a similar issue ).

    Answers to your questions:

    1. CUPS Cloud Print is installed in /usr/share/cloudprint-cups/ , and it drops some driver programs in /usr/lib/cups/, you shouldn’t need to install any other printer drivers for CUPS Cloud Print to work with a cloud-ready printer.
    2. Yes, the Ubuntu packages should work on any version of Ubuntu after 10.04 ( it may even work on older versions, but I haven’t tested it recently ).

    Hope this helps

    Simon

13. There seems to be a disconnect on Archlinux where the package depends on pycups. python2-pycups seems to have stopped providing pycups (now replaced with the python3 version). Is the author aware of this issue and if not, where can we submit a bug?

    https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1468209#p1468209

14. Hi Zombielinux,

    I’ve just released a new package ( cupscloudprint-20140814.1 ) which depends on python2-pycups instead of pycups, this seems to fix the problem. You should automatically pull in the new package from the niftyrepo repository next time you update.

    Thanks

    Simon

15. Hi Simon,

    First of all, thank you for the great piece of software.

    Since upgrading to Yosemite on two machines, I’ve got this error popping up on both:

    Error adding: __Google_ (1280, u’server-error-internal-error’)
    Error adding: Generic_16BW-4 (1280, u’server-error-internal-error’)
    Error adding: Generic_16BW-4 (1280, u’server-error-internal-error’)
    Error adding: Samsung_SCX-4100_Series (1280, u’server-error-internal-error’)

    It is still some progress, because on the developer previews I couldn’t even install the package. I just thought I could bring this issue up, so hopefully it gets fixed in a next release.

16. Simon,
    Great package, it seems to work really well with A4 printers like the Brother HL-2150N I have installed on a windows XP machine. However, I am struggling with label printers. I have a Star TSP 700 II. It is installed on a windows XP machine and prints well directly from that machine to a custom label size (52x30cm). However, when this printer is added to CUPS via cloudprint, CUPS never picks the “media size” up correctly (defined under “default options”, even though it picks up the “page_size” as the custom label size defined in windows XP.

    How do I tell cups what the “media size” is? It keeps printing out 4 labels at a time. I presume that cups-cloudprint is using the drivers installed on the XP host machine? It seems strange that it can print fine locally, but not from cups….

    Any thoughts appreciated.

17. Hi Plamen,

    Thanks, I haven’t tried CUPS Cloud Print on Yosemite yet, I’ll have to investigate.

    Simon

18. Hi Cahir,

    Thanks, I haven’t personally tried CUPS Cloud Print with label printers – I guess the label printer is connected to the XP host machine, and somehow setup with Google Cloud Print on there ( I assume using Google Chrome or Chromium to share toe printer ), so it could be CUPS Cloud Print, Google Chrome or Chromium, or the drivers, or even Google Cloud Print itself not passing along the correct media size.

    Have you tried printing directly from Google Cloud Print and seeing if that works ( https://www.google.com/cloudprint/#printers – ‘Print’ button on left, upload a test file manually and select the media size in the options )? That may help narrow down where the problem is.

    Thanks

    Simon

19. Simon, Thanks for your reply and suggestions. You are correct – the label printer is an ethernet printer which is installed on Windows XP, where the default label size is specified. CUPS seems to pick up this label size from XP via cloudprint. This printer will print PDF labels just fine when sent locally from the XP machine.

    I printed directly from Google Cloudprint. The label came out fine, but there were an additional 2 blank labels. I suspect that this is because CUPs has the “media size” setting to A4 or letter. I can’t get anything smaller. If I installed this printer to cups directly, I would select the star drivers for cups, which would allow me to specify the media size. But I can’t seem to use these drivers when using cups-cloudprint, I can only use the cloudprint connection. Is there any way to specify that cups uses the star drivers?

    I also printed from the command line use lpr. The label printed, but again had an additional one blank label. So who knows?

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21. Hi Cahir,

    CUPS Cloud Print essentially is the ‘driver’ that CUPS uses the print with Google Cloudprint – it populates the parameters ( including media size ) from what Google Cloud Print provides, if you can send me the output ( via email to src@niftiestsoftware.com would be good ) of this command I can see if its something I can fix or work around in CUPS Cloud Print:

    sudo /usr/share/cloudprint-cups/reportissues.py

    Thanks

    Simon

22. What’s going on here? CUPS trys to print, encounters an error and then disables the Queue.

    CloudPrint;MDL:gcp://mschiller%40gmail.com/__google__docs”

    {u’status’: u”, u’isTosAccepted’: False, u’updateTime’: u’1370287324050′, u’gcpVersion’: u’1.0′, u’description’: u’Save your document as a PDF in Google Drive’, u’name’: u’Save to Google Docs’, u’tags’: [u’^recent’, u’__google__drive_enabled’, u’save’, u’docs’, u’pdf’, u’google’], u’defaultDisplayName’: u’Save to Google Drive’, u’accessTime’: u’1316132041869′, u’connectionStatus’: u’ONLINE’, u’id’: u’__google__docs’, u’ownerName’: u’Cloud Print’, u’capsHash’: u”, u’displayName’: u’Save to Google Drive’, u’ownerId’: u’cloudprinting@gmail.com’, u’type’: u’DRIVE’, u’createTime’: u’1311368403894′, u’proxy’: u’google-wide’}
    [{u’type’: u’ParameterDef’, u’psf:DataType’: u’xsd:string’, u’psk:DisplayName’: u’Google Drive File Name’, u’name’: u’__goog__drive_file_name’}]

    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File “/usr/share/cloudprint-cups/reportissues.py”, line 62, in
    stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
    File “/usr/lib64/python2.6/subprocess.py”, line 642, in __init__
    errread, errwrite)
    File “/usr/lib64/python2.6/subprocess.py”, line 1234, in _execute_child
    raise child_exception
    OSError: [Errno 13] Permission denied

23. Hi Matthew,

    That sounds like the permissions/ownerships for the dynamicppd.py script are wrong ( in /usr/share/cloudprint-cups ), the script should be owned by the ‘root’ user and be executable by the owner. I’d also advise checking the permissions of /usr/share/cloudprint-cups/backend.py if the permissions of dynamicppd.py have somehow been changed.

    Hope this helps

    Simon

    EDIT: Sorry, should be owned by root, not lp user

24. I get an error with the installer on Yosemite.

25. This looks very useful. I have one remaining dependency when I try to install from the rpm on openSUSE 13.1 (Bottle) (i586)

    I’m missing

    system-config-printer-libs

    I would like to know the best source for this for openSUSE 13.1

    many thanks,

    ‘ö-Dzin

26. Hi,

    I’ve installed on Ubuntu 14 and have had some success printing. However, when I add a second gmail account hoping to add the associated printers to my CUPS printer list, I only see the list of printers from the first email account. Any idea why that would be happening?

    Thanks,
    Paul

27. Hi David G,

    Do you get any error message? Can you also try the latest installer ( currently here ), as there were some changes in the last release that fixes some possible installation failures.

    Thanks

    Simon

28. Hi ‘ö-Dzin,

    I’d recommend using the Zypper repository from the “OpenSUSE 11.1+ , SUSE EL 11+ etc – Zypper Based”, otherwise you can install the dependencies for openSUSE manually from here:

    system-config-printer-libs
    which

    Hope this helps

    Simon

29. Hi Paul,

    It should work fine using the ‘setupcloudprint.py’ script ( just run the script and answer ‘Y’ when it asks if you would like to add more accounts, and then answer ‘Y’ to adding all printers to the account ).

    Does the ‘listcloudprinters.py’ script report the same printers for both accounts? If so, I’d suggest removing the second account and adding it again, making sure you are logged in with the correct account when completing the verification code step.

    Hope this helps

    Simon

30. Hi Simon,

    Have you considered making the application bidirectional. What I mean is that currently it will forward print printed at to a Google Cloud Printer to a Cups printer . But it would be neat if if could work the other way as well having a Cups printer receive print sent to a Google Cloud Printer. This would allow any Cups printer to act as a Google Cloud Printer.

    Having that work as a real server without the complicated Chrome workaround that many people use would be fantastic.

    I hope you will consider it.

    Thanks

    Ulrik

31. Hi Ulrik,

    I haven’t really considered doing that as part of CUPS Cloud Print, as that already exists as a seperate project:

    https://github.com/armooo/cloudprint/

    Thanks

    Simon

32. i used cloudprint & cupscloudprint on an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server, no gui and no Chromium browser. running cloudprint -d on server & all clients are also same ubuntu.

    uploaded all my cups printers to GCP just fine (via cloudprint). all the GCP ready printers came to my print server fine too (via cupscloudprint).

    i can print fine to GCP ready printers (using the above GCP/CUPS combo) & directly to the non-GCP printers (aka using CUPS only, no GCP).

    but when i print to a non-GCP ready printer via GCP, the job gets to GCP & is shown as being queued, but remains so & never prints.

    other symptoms:
    sometimes (not always) the server now shows error message “ERROR: Couldn’t connect to Cloud Service: will try again in 60 secs.”
    something dumps a file into the /tmp directory on the server and this happens every minute until the print job is cancelled in GCP.

    i’ve searched extensively & cant find the cause or solution. I do not want to load a gui and chromium onto a minimal server. cloudprint+cupscloudprint should = printing to non-GCP printers from my clients.

    pls help!

33. Hi mowglie,

    This sounds like an issue on the Cloudprint daemon’s side, as it sounds like CUPS Cloud Print itself is working fine – I don’t know if it helps but I’ve found this issue on Github, which has the same error message. It may be that something has changed on Google’s side recently, so it may be worth checking you have the very latest version of the Cloudprint daemon installed. I’d also try printing directly from within Chromium or Google Docs directly to completely rule out any potential issues caused by CUPS Cloud Print.

    Hope this helps

    Simon

34. Tried installing on Yosemite MacBookPro.

    Installation brought following error:$ sudo /usr/local/share/cloudprint-cups/setupcloudprint.py
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File “/usr/local/share/cloudprint-cups/setupcloudprint.py”, line 68, in
    from auth import Auth
    File “/usr/local/share/cloudprint-cups/auth.py”, line 24, in
    import six
    ImportError: No module named six

    I’m sure this has to do with the python2-six module, however I don’t see this package available with brew or ports

35. Simon

    I discovered the beauty of pip and installed the python six library on Mac Os Yosemite, but as others have mentioned above I get the following errors:
    taken from /var/log/cups/error_log

    E [18/Jan/2015:01:59:46 -0600] copy_model: empty PPD file
    E [18/Jan/2015:01:59:46 -0600] [Client 4] Returning IPP server-error-internal-error for CUPS-Add-Modify-Printer (ipp://localhost/printers/XT1060) from localhost
    E [18/Jan/2015:01:59:46 -0600] copy_model: empty PPD file
    E [18/Jan/2015:01:59:46 -0600] [Client 4] Returning IPP server-error-internal-error for CUPS-Add-Modify-Printer (ipp://localhost/printers/Lexmark%5FX6100%5FSeries) from localhost
    E [18/Jan/2015:01:59:46 -0600] copy_model: empty PPD file
    E [18/Jan/2015:01:59:46 -0600] [Client 4] Returning IPP server-error-internal-error for CUPS-Add-Modify-Printer (ipp://localhost/printers/Save%5Fto%5FGoogle%5FDrive) from localhost
    E [18/Jan/2015:01:59:46 -0600] copy_model: empty PPD file
    E [18/Jan/2015:01:59:46 -0600] [Client 4] Returning IPP server-error-internal-error for CUPS-Add-Modify-Printer (ipp://localhost/printers/Print%5Fto%5FFedEx%5FOffice) from localhost
    E [18/Jan/2015:01:59:46 -0600] copy_model: empty PPD file
    E [18/Jan/2015:01:59:46 -0600] [Client 4] Returning IPP server-error-internal-error for CUPS-Add-Modify-Printer (ipp://localhost/printers/Galaxy%5FNexus) from localhost
    E [18/Jan/2015:01:59:46 -0600] copy_model: empty PPD file
    E [18/Jan/2015:01:59:46 -0600] [Client 4] Returning IPP server-error-internal-error for CUPS-Add-Modify-Printer (ipp://localhost/printers/Xoom) from localhost

36. Hi KevDog,

    As I guess you’ve already discovered, you can install python-six using:

    sudo /usr/bin/easy_install six

    It’s odd those errors are referring to “ipp://localhost/…”, did you add the printers using the /usr/local/share/cloudprint-cups/setupcloudprint.py script ?

    Thanks

    Simon

37. I ran the script again — Here is the console output:
    $ sudo ./setupcloudprint.py
    Password:
    You currently have these accounts configured:
    @gmail.com
    Add more accounts (Y/N)? n
    Add all Google Cloud Print printers from @gmail.com to CUPS (Y/N)? y
    Use a prefix for names of created printers (Y/N)? N
    Error adding: Lexmark_X6100_Series (1280, u’server-error-internal-error’)
    Error adding: XT1060 (1280, u’server-error-internal-error’)
    Error adding: Save_to_Google_Drive (1280, u’server-error-internal-error’)
    Error adding: Print_to_FedEx_Office (1280, u’server-error-internal-error’)
    Error adding: Galaxy_Nexus (1280, u’server-error-internal-error’)
    Error adding: Xoom (1280, u’server-error-internal-error’)
    Added 6 new printers to CUPS

38. Ok interesting, do you get any useful error messages if you try again after enabling debug logging in CUPS ( set LogLevel to debug in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf and restart cups )?

    Thanks

    Simon

39. I added two printers (owned by other users but shared with my account) in Google Cloud Print but they do not appear via listcloudprinters.py script.
    I do see them in the Google Cloud Print printers list.
    I also deleted some printers and this removed them from the listcloudprinters.py output, but the new printers do not show up.
    Any ideas?

    Is there anything I can do with Printer ID string to configure the printer manually?

40. NICE JOB

    This works perfectly on ubuntu 14.04 and debian wheezy and solves the MAJOR problem
    of no printer drivers for linux especially form companies like fujitsu

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42. Any tips on getting a Cups client to print to a GCP CUPS Server? It would save me from having to configure GCP on each of the linux machines.

43. Hi Simon,

    looks great, but is there a version for the recent Debian 8 Jessie? I have difficulties with the github installation. First I need to install libcups2-dev to run cups-config, looks o.k., but then there is no /usr/share/cloudprint-cups directory, only /usr/share/cloudprint and no setupcloudprint.py.

    I am working on a Chromebook on which a very recent Debian Jessie is installed and I have difficulties to find out the proper authentication in cups for my HP-Officejet Pro8610. So Google’s cloud would be fine as it is already running fine within Chrome.

    Many thanks and
    Cheers,
    Gernot

44. Have been using this for about 6 months with no problem. Then our printers stopped printing. I deleted and recreated a Google Cloud printer and tried to install it on CUPS using:

    sudo /usr/share/cloudprint-cups/setupcloudprint.py

    A new printer shows up on CUPS but appears in the printer list like this:

    ▼ Queue Name ▼ Description Location Make and Model Status
    {printer_name} {printer_info} {printer_location} {printer_make_and_model} Paused

    rather than

    DocumentPrinter-XXX DocumentPrinter-XXX Google Cloud Print Google Cloud Print, 1.0 Idle

    and doesn’t work of course. Any idea what has gone wrong?

45. Hi Dee,

    As far as I know there shouldn’t be anything special you need to setup, just install CUPS Cloud Print on the server you are running the CUPS server on, and setup the client machines to point to the shared CUPS server.

    Simon

46. Hi Gernot,

    As far as I know the normal deb package should work, do you get any errors when installing the deb?

    Simon

47. Hi Paul,

    That does look odd, does running this command output any obvious errors? :

    sudo /usr/share/cloudprint-cups/reportissues.py

    Thanks

    Simon

48. Hi Simon,
    yes, I get errors: setupcloudprint.py complains on line 68 that auth.py does not find “six” in line 24 (no module named six).
    Cheers, Gernot

49. Hi,
    trying to install python-six runs into unmet dependencies: “cupscloudprint: Depends: python-httplib2 but it is not going to be installed
    Depends: imagemagick
    E: Unmet dependencies. Try ‘apt-get -f install’ with no packages (or specify a solution).”
    Seems to be a problem concerning different Python versions. Can I not only remove those commands which take care of older Python versions?
    reportissues.py reports the same difficulty with “six”, on line 25 in auth.py, just after line 24.
    Cheers, Gernot

50. Hello ,
    i would like this to work from my FreeBSD VPS … 10.1-RELEASE-p9 FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE-p9 #0: Tue Apr 7 01:09:46 UTC 2015 root@amd64-builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC amd64… running headless with gnome2/mate and tightvnc.
    Printing using cloudprint from within Chromium using the google functionality is working so i’m sure that this should work also in my setup.

    But i ran into the same error as KevDog did on january 19.
    I’ve put loglevel debug in cupsd.conf and restarted cupsd. I have 1 real printer and 1 print-to-google-drive printer defined.

    When i run the script i get:
    # /usr/local/share/cloudprint-cups/setupcloudprint.py
    You currently have these accounts configured:
    john.doe@gmail.com
    Add more accounts (Y/N)? n
    Add all Google Cloud Print printers from john.doe@gmail.com to CUPS (Y/N)? y
    Use a prefix for names of created printers (Y/N)? y
    Prefix ( e.g. GCP- )? GOO-
    Error adding: GOO-Canon_MF8000_Series_UFRII_LT (1280, u’server-error-internal-error’)
    Error adding: GOO-Opslaan_in_Google_Drive (1280, u’server-error-internal-error’)
    Added 2 new printers to CUPS

    (prefix or not makes no difference)

    I was curious if KevDog has it solved … since 4 months have passed since his post?

    Anyway thumbs up for this nifty printingsolution…. hope i get it to work.