Introduction:
In web development, generating PDFs is a common requirement for tasks such as generating invoices, creating reports, or providing printable content to users. Laravel, a popular PHP framework, offers various libraries and packages to simplify PDF generation. One such package is Laravel Dompdf, which seamlessly integrates the Dompdf library into Laravel applications. In this blog post, we’ll explore how to use Laravel Dompdf to generate PDFs and provide you with a practical example to get you started.

Installing Laravel Dompdf:
Before we dive into the implementation, we need to install Laravel Dompdf into our Laravel project. Follow these steps:

Step 1: Open your terminal and navigate to your Laravel project directory.
Step 2: Run the following composer command to install Laravel Dompdf:

composer require barryvdh/laravel-dompdf

Step 3: Laravel Dompdf will be automatically registered in your Laravel application. Now, let’s move on to generating a PDF.

Generating a PDF with Laravel Dompdf:
For this example, let’s assume that we want to generate a simple PDF that contains a list of users from our application.

Step 1: Create a new route in your Laravel routes file (routes/web.php or routes/api.php) that will trigger the PDF generation. For instance:

use App\Http\Controllers\PdfController;

Route::get('/generate-pdf', [PdfController::class, 'generatePdf']);

Step 2: Create a new controller called PdfController using the following command:

php artisan make:controller PdfController

Step 3: Open the PdfController.php file in your text editor and define the generatePdf method:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Barryvdh\DomPDF\Facade as PDF;
use App\Models\User;

class PdfController extends Controller
{
    public function generatePdf()
    {
        $users = User::all();

        $pdf = PDF::loadView('pdf.users', compact('users'));

        return $pdf->download('users.pdf');
    }
}

Step 4: In the generatePdf method, we fetch all users from the User model and pass them to a view called pdf.users. We then use the loadView method provided by Laravel Dompdf to load the view and generate the PDF. Finally, we use the download method to prompt the user to download the generated PDF file with the name users.pdf.

Step 5: Create the users.blade.php view file inside the resources/views/pdf directory. Here’s an example of what the view might contain:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>Users List</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Users List</h1>
    <table>
        <thead>
            <tr>
                <th>Name</th>
                <th>Email</th>
                <th>Created At</th>
            </tr>
        </thead>
        <tbody>
            @foreach($users as $user)
                <tr>
                    <td>{{ $user->name }}</td>
                    <td>{{ $user->email }}</td>
                    <td>{{ $user->created_at }}</td>
                </tr>
            @endforeach
        </tbody>
    </table>
</body>
</html>

Step 6: Finally, you can access the PDF generation route by visiting /generate-pdf in your browser. This will trigger the generatePdf method in the PdfController, which will fetch the users and generate the PDF file for download.

Conclusion:

Laravel Dompdf provides a convenient and straightforward way to generate PDFs within your Laravel applications. In this blog post, we walked through the process of installing Laravel Dompdf and creating a simple PDF generation example. However, this is just scratching the surface of what you can achieve with this powerful package. You can explore additional customization options, such as adding headers and footers, setting page dimensions, or styling the PDF output. Be sure to refer to the official Laravel Dompdf documentation (https://github.com/barryvdh/laravel-dompdf) for more advanced usage scenarios.

By integrating Laravel Dompdf into your Laravel project, you can effortlessly generate professional-looking PDFs, offering enhanced functionality and user experience to your application’s users.

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