Installation & setup

On this page

  1. Choosing a driver
  2. Laravel Boost
  3. Publishing the config file

You can install the package via composer:

composer require spatie/laravel-pdf

This package supports multiple PDF generation drivers. You can set the driver via the LARAVEL_PDF_DRIVER environment variable, or in the config file.

The Browsershot driver requires the spatie/browsershot package:

composer require spatie/browsershot

You'll also need to install the required dependencies for Browsershot to work. You can find the instructions here.

The Cloudflare driver uses Cloudflare's Browser Rendering API to generate PDFs. It does not require Node.js or a Chrome binary, making it a great choice for cloud-hosted Laravel apps.

To get started with Cloudflare:

  1. Make sure you have a Cloudflare account
  2. In the Cloudflare dashboard, go to Manage account > Account API tokens in the sidebar
  3. Click Create Token and create a token with the Account.Browser Rendering permission
  4. Your Account ID can be found in the address bar of the Cloudflare dashboard URL
  5. Add the following to your .env file:
LARAVEL_PDF_DRIVER=cloudflare
CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN=your-api-token
CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID=your-account-id

That's it. No other dependencies are required since the Cloudflare driver uses Laravel's built-in HTTP client.

The Gotenberg driver uses Gotenberg, an open-source Docker-based API with headless Chromium.

You will need a running Gotenberg instance (started with docker run --rm -p 3000:3000 gotenberg/gotenberg:8, or similar; see the installation guide for additional setup instructions).

Add the following to your .env file:

LARAVEL_PDF_DRIVER=gotenberg
GOTENBERG_URL=http://your-host:your-port
# If you set up authentication, add these lines too:
GOTENBERG_USERNAME=username
GOTENBERG_PASSWORD=password

The WeasyPrint driver uses WeasyPrint, a Python-based PDF generation tool with excellent CSS Paged Media support including repeating headers/footers and page counters.

First, install the WeasyPrint binary on your system. Follow the installation guide for your OS.

Then install the PHP wrapper:

composer require pontedilana/php-weasyprint

Set the driver in your .env file:

LARAVEL_PDF_DRIVER=weasyprint

See Using the WeasyPrint driver for more details on configuration and supported options.

The DOMPDF driver requires no external binaries, no Node.js, and no Docker. It works everywhere PHP runs.

composer require dompdf/dompdf

Then set the driver in your .env file:

LARAVEL_PDF_DRIVER=dompdf

Note that DOMPDF has more limited CSS support than the Chromium-based drivers. See Using the DOMPDF driver for details.

This package ships with a Laravel Boost skill. After installing the package, run php artisan boost:install to register the skill. This will help AI agents in your project generate correct PDF code.

Optionally, you can publish the config file with:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=pdf-config

This is the content of the published config file:

return [
    'driver' => env('LARAVEL_PDF_DRIVER', 'browsershot'),

    'browsershot' => [
        'node_binary' => env('LARAVEL_PDF_NODE_BINARY'),
        'npm_binary' => env('LARAVEL_PDF_NPM_BINARY'),
        'include_path' => env('LARAVEL_PDF_INCLUDE_PATH'),
        'chrome_path' => env('LARAVEL_PDF_CHROME_PATH'),
        'node_modules_path' => env('LARAVEL_PDF_NODE_MODULES_PATH'),
        'bin_path' => env('LARAVEL_PDF_BIN_PATH'),
        'temp_path' => env('LARAVEL_PDF_TEMP_PATH'),
        'write_options_to_file' => env('LARAVEL_PDF_WRITE_OPTIONS_TO_FILE', false),
        'no_sandbox' => env('LARAVEL_PDF_NO_SANDBOX', false),
    ],

    'cloudflare' => [
        'api_token' => env('CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN'),
        'account_id' => env('CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID'),
    ],

    'dompdf' => [
        'is_remote_enabled' => env('LARAVEL_PDF_DOMPDF_REMOTE_ENABLED', false),
        'chroot' => env('LARAVEL_PDF_DOMPDF_CHROOT'),
    ],

    'weasyprint' => [
        'binary' => env('LARAVEL_PDF_WEASYPRINT_BINARY', 'weasyprint'),
        'timeout' => 10,
    ],

];
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