ESC/POS Printer Server

I needed to print to a USB thermal printer (the ESC/POS kind you see at shop counters) from a web app, and it turned out to be a real pain. Talking to these printers from the browser is blocked by driver issues, permissions, and a dozen other complications, so there is no clean way to just send a print job.

So I built a small server to sit in the middle and handle all of that. My web app makes a simple print call over HTTP, the server talks to the printer over USB using ESC/POS, and you get a proper thermal print out the other end. It hides all the messy hardware and driver details behind one straightforward endpoint.

Right now it is wired to a fixed receipt template for my own use case, but the core idea is a general abstraction. The natural next step is to open the template up so anyone could send their own format and use it with any ESC/POS printer, not just mine.

How you can use it

Run the server on the machine the printer is plugged into, then POST your print payload to it from wherever your app lives. The repo has the setup and the platform-specific USB driver notes.