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The ability to generate PDF documents from web applications is useful for tasks such as creating invoices, reports, or printable information. Laravel, a popular PHP framework, provides a number of modules and packages to help in PDF generation.

We will walk you through the process of making PDFs in Laravel 10 using the DomPDF module, allowing you to generate dynamic and configurable PDF documents from your online application.

Throughout this article, we’ll look at how to integrate and use the DomPDF library in Laravel 10, including installation, configuration, and practical examples of dynamically generating PDF documents.

Let’s get started.

What is DomPDF Library?

DomPDF is a free and open-source PHP framework that allows developers to create PDF documents from HTML and CSS. It’s very handy for converting online pages or web-based content to PDF files. DomPDF is written in PHP and can be integrated into PHP applications, making it an attractive solution for projects requiring dynamic PDF creation.

DomPDF’s key features and qualities include:

HTML to PDF Conversion: DomPDF is capable of converting HTML and CSS material to PDF format. This is useful for generating PDF documents from web pages, reports, invoices, and other web-based content.

CSS Support: DomPDF supports CSS for formatting PDF content, giving developers control over the layout, fonts, colours, and other aesthetic characteristics of the created PDFs.

Unicode and Multilingual Support: DomPDF has Unicode support, allowing you to include text in a variety of languages and character sets within PDF documents.

Image Embedding: Images (such as logos and graphics) can be included in DomPDF PDFs.

Page Size and Orientation: For the generated PDFs, developers can define page sizes (e.g., A4, Letter) and orientation (portrait or landscape).

Laravel Installation

Open terminal and run this command to create a laravel project.

composer create-project laravel/laravel myblog

It will create a project folder with name myblog inside your local system.

To start the development server of laravel –

php artisan serve

URL: http://127.0.0.1:8000

Assuming laravel already installed inside your system.

How To Install DomPDF Package to Laravel?

Here, we will install a pdf package to laravel application.

Open project terminal and run this command

composer require barryvdh/laravel-dompdf

When we install we should see the given image in terminal.

Setup Data Controller

Back to project terminal and run this command into it,

php artisan make:controller SiteController

It will create SiteController.php file inside /app/Http/Controllers folder.

Open file and write this code into it,

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Barryvdh\DomPDF\Facade\Pdf;

class SiteController extends Controller
{
    public function generatePDF()
    {
        $data = [
            'title' => 'Welcome to OnlineWebTutorBlog.com',
            'author' => "Sanjay"
        ];
          
        $pdf = PDF::loadView('my-pdf-file', $data);
    
        return $pdf->download('onlinewebtutorblog.pdf');
    }
}

Concept

Use DomPDF package and it’s method to create pdf file with view.

$pdf = PDF::loadView('my-pdf-file', $data);

return $pdf->download('onlinewebtutorblog.pdf');

It first creates a PDF from a blade template and then download it.

Create Blade Template

Create a file named as my-pdf-file.blade.php inside /resources/views folder.

This template file will be the layout for pdf file.

Open file my-pdf-file.blade.php and write this code into it,

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>Title From OnlineWebTutorBlog</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Title: {{ $title }}</h1>
    <h3>Author: {{ $author }}</h3>
    <p>ut aliquip ex ea commodoconsequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse
    cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidata.</p>
</body>
</html>

Add Route

Open web.php from /routes folder. Add this route into it.

//...

use App\Http\Controllers\SiteController;

Route::get('generate-pdf', [SiteController::class, 'generatePDF']);

//...

Application Testing

Run this command into project terminal to start development server,

php artisan serve

URL: http://127.0.0.1:8000/generate-pdf

When we type this URL, it will download a pdf file into system.

That’s it.

We hope this article helped you to learn about Laravel 10 How To Create PDFs Using DomPDF Library Tutorial Example in a very detailed way.

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