Thanks for a very quick, very detailed and complete answer - it is greatly appreciated. I do apologise for not stating that my app is a nodejs app. Also I did state "with no real solution" on the issue of "timeout". This was unfair of me. I should have been more clear in that I did find a number of complaints about the timeout and although there were responses, none of them worked for me - or maybe I simply did not spot my problem in the responses I read.

As for progress on my side. I did read the articles you ask me as I worked through your response and ended up creating a simple test directly out of the documentation. The test I did was to create a project exactly from the doc as follows:

var http = require('http');
var jsreport = require('jsreport');

http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  jsreport.render({ template: { content: 'Hello world', engine: 'jsrender', recipe: 'phantom-pdf' } }).then(function(out) {
    out.stream.pipe(res);
  }).catch(function(e) {
    res.end(e.message);
  });

}).listen(1337, '127.0.0.1');

Sure enough - I got the timeout. But then I tried starting the server from the CLI in stead of vscode debugger and it worked. Only after I tried this I finished reading your post and found that you have actually have mentioned that exact problem with vscode debugger.

Once again - thanks for a very helpful response to my question.

I would like to start jsreport from another app. I have done the following:

npm install jsreport
node node_modules/.bin/jsreport start

Then I can open http://localhost:5488 and print the demo "Invoice" report. To start it from bin/www (my application), I found the following code:

var jsreport = require('jsreport')();
jsreport.use(require('jsreport-handlebars'));
jsreport.use(require('jsreport-phantom-pdf'));
jsreport.use(require('jsreport-fs-store')());
jsreport.init().then(function () {
  // running
}).catch(function (e) {
  // error during startup
  console.error(e.stack)
  process.exit(1)
})

With this in place, I can still open http://localhost:5488 and still see the demo reports, but I cannot run the Invoice report because it simply times out. There seems to be a lot of people complaining about this, but no real solution. The next thing I tried was to copy the code of node_modules/.bin/jsreport into a new file (bin/jsreport), changed the paths to work (require) and also hardcoded the arguments as [ "start" ]. I did this with the hope of being able to call this script from bin/www. Funny thing is that if I run this script from the command line (node bin/jsreport), it works as expected if I open http://localhost:5488 in my browser, but if I use vscode debugger it times out on generating the Invoice report. (the rest of the JSReport user interface works). The vscode lauch config is as follows:

        {
            "type": "node",
            "request": "launch",
            "name": "Launch JSReport",
            "sourceMaps": false,
            "program": "${workspaceRoot}/bin/jsreport"
        }

So I found a different solution to start jsreport from my app.

var jsrcore = require("jsreport-core");
var phantom = require("jsreport-phantom-pdf");
var renderer = require("jsreport-jsrender");
var jsreportfs = require('jsreport-fs-store')();
var jsreport = jsrcore({ tasks: { strategy: 'in-process',  allowedModules: '*' } });
// I also tried the following in stead of the in-process:
// var jsreport = jsrcore({ tasks: { allowedModules: '*' } });

Using this, using jsreport.render({template: {name: "Invoice"} ... }) does not time out any more, but I get the following error:

    var options = { 
        template: {name: "Invoice"}, 
        recipe: "html", 
        engine: "jsrender",
        options: {  timeout: 600000, "Content-Disposition": "attachment; filename=invoice.pdf" } 
    };
    jsreport.render(options).then(function(out) {
        out.stream.pipe(res);
    }).catch(function(err) {
        res.status(500).json({
            success: false,
            message: "An error occurred: " + err
        });
    });

An error occurred: Error: Error during rendering report: Unable to find specified template or user doesnt have permissions to read it: Invoice

Is there not a simple example somewhere that simply shows how to start jsreport from within an application that also tells you how to get the Invoice pdf?