This script will generate avahi .service files for shared CUPS printers.

This script will connect to a CUPS server and for each printer configured and marked as shared will generate a .service file for avahi that is compatible with Apple's AirPrint announcements. Any printer that can be configured to work with CUPS can be used. Printers should not be configured in CUPS as raw, unless the printer can natively print PDF. That is to say, CUPS needs to already be configured with a PDF filter. Debian based distributions ship CUPS pre-configured this way.

This script can also discover networked printers via DNS-SD, independent of CUPS, and produce exact .service files for them, allowing the printers to be announced on different subnets by copying the .service files to /etc/avahi/services/ there. This solves the problem of AirPrint printers not being availabe outside the local subnet even though routing/NAT exists between subnets.

DNSSD has a limit of 255 Chars for a given txt-record, because of this the list of accepted pdl's will be truncated to fit. If you're curious to see which ones are trimmed out of the list run with the script with the verbose flag (--verbose)

If python-lxml is installed, .service files will be generated in a human readble format, I wasn't able to get minidom's version to work acceptably.

The git repository also contains airprint.convs, airprint.types and apple.types. These need to be copied to the /usr/share/cups/mime folder.

Copy the .service files generated by this script to /etc/avahi/services.

Then restart both avahi and cups with

sudo service avahi-daemon restart
sudo service cups restart

This script requires depends on the python-cups library, and optionally python-lxml to make pretty xml files.

Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install python-cups python-lxml

CentOS:

sudo yum install system-config-printer-libs

Usage: airprint-generate.py [options]

Options:
    -h, --help            show this help message and exit
    -s, --dnssd           Search for network printers using DNS-SD (requires
                          avahi)
    -D DNSDOMAIN, --dnsdomain=DNSDOMAIN
                          DNS domain where printers are located.
    -c, --cups            Search CUPS for shared printers (requires CUPS)
    -H HOSTNAME, --host=HOSTNAME
                          Hostname of CUPS server (optional)
    -P PORT, --port=PORT  Port number of CUPS server
    -u USER, --user=USER  Username to authenticate with against CUPS
    -d DIRECTORY, --directory=DIRECTORY
                          Directory to create service files
    -v, --verbose         Print debugging information to STDERR
    -p PREFIX, --prefix=PREFIX
                          Prefix all files with this string
    -a, --admin           Include the printer specified uri as the adminurl