The Giraffe Print Service is a Windows background service that automatically picks up print jobs from Elevated Signals and sends them to your configured printers. Once installed, it runs silently in the background, even when no one is logged in to the computer.

Perfect for:

⚠️ Important: Only run one of the Giraffe desktop app or the Giraffe Print Service at a time — not both. Running both simultaneously will cause duplicate print jobs. If you install the Print Service, you should close and can safely uninstall the desktop app.

Before you begin, make sure you have:

💡 Tip: You can check your Node.js version by opening Command Prompt and running node --version

⚠️ Note: Node.js 22.15 is the minimum. Some network configurations need a Node.js setting that older versions do not support — see Troubleshooting below.

After installation, you'll need to log in and configure your printers.

Open Command Prompt and run:

This opens your browser to complete the login. Once authenticated, you'll see a success message.

See which printers are configured in Elevated Signals:

Start the service to start polling for print jobs:

Check the service status:

You should see your enabled printers and connection status.

The usual cause is that the service is installed and running, but not logged in.

A service that shows as Running in Windows Services can still be logged out. Windows only reports that the program is running — not that it has valid credentials. This is why the service can look perfectly healthy while nothing prints.

Check the credentials first:

If you see no credentials found, log in again:

Then confirm jobs are being picked up:

💡 If the printer itself is the suspect — nothing prints at all, or the output is blank or misaligned — see How To Troubleshoot Giraffe for printer hardware checks.

If giraffe-service login fails with a message like:

then your network is inspecting HTTPS traffic. This is common with corporate security gateways (Netskope, Zscaler, and similar) and with some antivirus products. They re-sign traffic with your organisation's own certificate authority. Windows trusts that authority, so your browser accepts it — but Node.js, which the print service runs on, keeps its own separate list of trusted authorities and does not.

The telltale sign: you can log in to Elevated Signals in a browser on that same computer, but the print service cannot.

This often appears after a network change with no change to the printer or the computer — a new security gateway, a domain migration, or a certificate rotation.

Open PowerShell as Administrator and run:

Then restart the computer.

Both steps are required. Without Administrator the command is denied (access to the registry path is denied), and without the restart the running service never sees the change — login will keep failing.

This tells Node.js to also trust the certificate authorities Windows already trusts. It does not disable any security checking; certificates are still fully validated.

After the restart, verify:

The first command should print --use-system-ca. Then print a test label from Elevated Signals to confirm.

⚠️ This has to be done on each computer running the print service.

💡 The permanent fix is on the network side. Ask your IT or network team to exclude *.elevatedsignals.com from HTTPS/SSL inspection — often called a "do not decrypt" or "bypass" rule. That covers every workstation at once and survives certificate rotations and Node.js upgrades, so the problem cannot come back.

⚠️ Do not use NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED=0. It appears to fix the problem, but it switches off certificate validation entirely for that program — not something you want on a service that holds login credentials.

Collect this before contacting support — it saves a round trip:

🌟 Please don't hesitate to reach out to our Support Team should you require any further assistance!

Yes! Once installed, the service is configured to start automatically when Windows starts.

If the service is not starting automatically after a reboot, you can verify and configure it using the Windows Services manager:

The service checks for new print jobs every 10 seconds by default. If you need faster printing, you can reduce this interval:

giraffe-service stop 2. Open the config file in Notepad:

notepad C:\ProgramData\Giraffe\config.json 3. Find the "pollingIntervalMs" value and change it. For example, to check every 3 seconds:

"pollingIntervalMs": 3000 4. Save the file and start the service:

giraffe-service start

⚠️ Note: Setting the interval below 3000ms (3 seconds) is not recommended as it may increase API load.