Laravel

PDF generation in Laravel

Blade gives you the HTML and Laravel’s HTTP client gives you a timeout and retries in one line, which is most of what a production integration needs.

The code

<?php
// app/Http/Controllers/InvoiceController.php
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Http;

public function pdf(Invoice $invoice)
{
    $html = view('invoices.show', compact('invoice'))->render();

    $response = Http::withToken(config('services.pdfcraft.key'))
        ->timeout(60)
        ->retry(2, 500)
        ->post('https://api.pdfcraft.dev/v1/render', [
            'html' => $html,
            'options' => [
                'printBackground' => true,
                'margin' => ['top' => '20mm', 'bottom' => '20mm'],
            ],
        ]);

    abort_if($response->failed(), 502, $response->json('error.message'));

    return response($response->body(), 200, [
        'Content-Type' => 'application/pdf',
        'Content-Disposition' => 'attachment; filename="invoice-'.$invoice->id.'.pdf"',
    ]);
}

What to watch for

`Http::withToken()` writes the `Authorization: Bearer` header for you — there is no need to build it by hand.
`->retry(2, 500)` retries on connection failures and 5xx, which is right. Do not retry a 4xx: a 400 will be a 400 again.
Put the key in `config/services.php` and read it with `config()`, not `env()` — `env()` returns null once the config is cached in production.

Why not run the browser yourself

You can. Puppeteer and Playwright both work, and for a script you run by hand they are the right answer. The cost arrives at the point it becomes a service someone depends on: one long-lived browser per process rather than one per request, a semaphore so four renders do not become forty, a hard timeout that force-closes a hung page before it holds a slot forever, a scheduled restart because Chromium leaks, and a Chromium version you are now responsible for patching.

None of that is hard. All of it is work that has nothing to do with your product, and it fails under concurrency rather than in testing — which is the worst time to discover it.

PDF generation in Laravel

The code

What to watch for

Why not run the browser yourself

Other frameworks

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