Generating PDFs with spatie/browsershot in Laravel

The spatie/browsershot package provides an easy way to generate PDFs from HTML in Laravel applications. With just a few lines of code, you can convert blades, DOM elements, or external URLs to PDFs.

Laravel PDF Export Tutorial

Installation

You can install the package via Composer:

composer require spatie/browsershot

This will install the package and its dependencies.

Usage

To generate a PDF from a blade template, you can do:

// Load the template 
$template = (new \Spatie\Browsershot\Browsershot())
    ->bodyHtml('<h1>Hello World</h1>') 

// Save as a PDF 
$template->savePdf('hello-world.pdf');

You can also pass a view to convert the rendered HTML to PDF:

$pdf = Browsershot::html('hello-world-template', ['name' => 'John'])
    ->savePdf('report.pdf');

To generate a PDF from a URL:

Browsershot::url('https://www.example.com')
    ->savePdf('example.pdf');

There are many other options like setting paper size, margins, landscape/portrait orientation, and more.

Headers and Footers

You can add custom HTML headers and footers to the PDF using the headerHtml and footerHtml methods:

Browsershot::url('https://www.example.com')
    ->headerHtml('<p>This is my header</p>')
    ->footerHtml('<p>Copyright 2021</p>')
    ->savePdf('example.pdf'); 

Additional Options

Here are some other useful options:

• setNodeBinary - Set a custom Node binary to use for PDF generation
• setNpmBinary - Set a custom NPM binary to use for PDF generation
• setOption - Customize the underlying wkhtmltopdf options
• showBackground - Show background graphics and colors
• landscape - Orient page landscape
• margins - Set margins (in mm)
• pages - Convert only specific pages

Here you can more about
PDF generation via browsershot.

Demo Project

For a full demo project showing PDF generation via browsershot, check out this example Laravel app.

So in summary, the spatie/browsershot package provides a simple Laravel interface to generate PDFs from HTML, CSS, and web URLs. It can be used for many use cases like generating invoices, reports, receipts, and more.