verumconsilium/laravel-browsershot

Browsershot Laravel wrapper to generate PDF files and Screenshots using Headless Chrome

Browsershot wrapper for Laravel 5

This package takes advantage of Google Chrome's Headless mode to take screenshots and generate PDFs from websites, views and raw html, _(*1)

, _(*2)

Requirements

• Node 7.6.0 or higher
• Google Chrome
• Puppeteer Node library.

You can install Puppeteer in your project via NPM:, _(*3)

npm install puppeteer

Or you could opt to just install it globally, _(*4)

npm install puppeteer --global

On a Forge provisioned Ubuntu 16.04 server you can install the latest stable version of Chrome like this:, _(*5)

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_8.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs gconf-service libasound2 libatk1.0-0 libc6 libcairo2 libcups2 libdbus-1-3 libexpat1 libfontconfig1 libgcc1 libgconf-2-4 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 libglib2.0-0 libgtk-3-0 libnspr4 libpango-1.0-0 libpangocairo-1.0-0 libstdc++6 libx11-6 libx11-xcb1 libxcb1 libxcomposite1 libxcursor1 libxdamage1 libxext6 libxfixes3 libxi6 libxrandr2 libxrender1 libxss1 libxtst6 ca-certificates fonts-liberation libappindicator1 libnss3 lsb-release xdg-utils wget
sudo npm install --global --unsafe-perm puppeteer
sudo chmod -R o+rx /usr/lib/node_modules/puppeteer/.local-chromium

Installation

Install the package through composer, _(*6)

composer require verumconsilium/laravel-browsershot

After the package is installed the service provider will be automatically discovered and two new Facades PDF and Screenshot will be available, _(*7)

Usage

The recommended way to use this package is through its Facades, _(*8)

PDF

Generating a PDF from a view and returning it inline

  use VerumConsilium\Browsershot\Facades\PDF;

  ...

  return PDF::loadView('view.name', $data)
            ->inline();

You can chain all the methods available in the browsershot master library, _(*9)

Returning the PDF as a download

  use VerumConsilium\Browsershot\Facades\PDF;

  ...

  return PDF::loadView('view.name', $data)
            ->margins(20, 0, 0, 20)
            ->download();

You can pass the custom file name and additional headers the response will have to the inline and download methods like, _(*10)

  PDF::loadHtml('<h1>Awesome PDF</h1>') 
      ->download('myawesomepdf.pdf', [
        'Authorization' => 'token'
      ]);

Persisting PDF to disk

If you would like to save the generated pdf file to your storage disk you can call the store or storeAs method, _(*11)

  $pdfStoredPath = PDF::loadUrl('https://google.com')
                      ->store('pdfs/')

This will use the default storage driver to store the pdf in the pdfs/ folder giving it a unique name. If you would like to specify the name you can call de storeAs method, _(*12)

  $pdfStoredPath = PDF::loadUrl('https://google.com')
                      ->storeAs('pdfs/', 'google.pdf')

Screenshots

Screenshots are created the same way as PDFs just change the facade to Screenshot, _(*13)

Generating screenshots as JPG/JPEG

By default screenshots will be taken as PNG format if you would like to use JPG instead call the useJPG() method, _(*14)

use VerumConsilium\Browsershot\Facades\Screenshot;

Screenshot::loadView('view.name', $data)
           ->useJPG()
           ->margins(20, 0, 0, 20)
           ->download();