Generating and rendering PDFs in Laravel.

We can easily generate PDFs in Laravel using the package barryvdh/laravel-dompdf. To install it to an application, just run the command —

composer require barryvdh/laravel-dompdf

After installing the package, we need to add it to providers array in config/app.php as BarryVdh\Barryvdh\DomPDF\ServiceProvider::class.

Now we need to create a blade template that would be used as a markup for the PDF that we want to generate. Let’s say our template looks like —

@extends('layouts.pdf')

@section('title', 'Example PDF')

@section('main')
  <h1>hello, world!</h1>
@endsection

As you can see, the above template just displays a hello world message. To generate a PDF using this template, the controller would be —

// ... controller code
$pdf = Pdf::setPaper('a4')->loadView(
  'pdfs.example'
);

// save the pdf output in s3
// this returns a boolean -> true if upload is successful else false
Storage::disk('s3')->put("pdfs/$filename.pdf", $pdf->output());

// finally we retrieve the pdf file path to render in browser
// since s3 files are private by default we need to create a route to retrieve the file
$pdfFileUrl = env('APP_URL')."/pdfs/$filename.pdf";

To render the the generated PDF in the browser using the file url, we need create a controller like —

public function pdfs(string $filename) {
  $file = Storage::disk('s3')->get("pdfs/$filename");
  $header = [
    'Content-Type' => 'application/pdf',
    'Content-Disposition' => 'inline;filename="' . $filename . '"'
  ];
  return response($file, 200, $header);
}

Now if we go to the url /pdfs/filename.pdf, we can see the generated PDF.

To pass data to the PDF template, we can just pass an array as the second argument of loadView. The code snippet shown below can be taken as a reference for this —

// ...
$pdf = Pdf::setPaper('a4')->loadView(
  'pdfs.example',
  ['user' => Auth::user()->name]
);
// ...

Let’s now try adding image assets to the PDF. We pass a image field to the data array passed to loadView and pass filesystem image to our PDF template. On rendering the generated PDF, we’ll see a Image not found or type unknown error.

This is because the package only supports base64 encoded images. To fix the issue, we can create an utility function to encode any image passed to the PDF template to base64 format. Let’s use the @php directive to create a function in the template itself. The code snippet below can be taken as a reference for this —

@php
  function base64Encode(string $imgPath) {
    $disk = Storage::disk('local');
    $imgFile = $disk->get($imgPath);
    $extension = pathinfo($disk->path($imgPath), PATHINFO_EXTENSION);
    return "data:image/$extension;base64," . base64_encode($imgFile);
  }
@endphp

Finally, if you check the PDF rendered after encoding the image, we can see it in the PDF.

— @bhargawanan_b