Building a PDF Invoice Generator with Laravel and Browsershot

Most PHP PDF libraries make you write your layout in a restricted dialect of HTML that doesn't support modern CSS: no flexbox, patchy support for web fonts, and surprises with page breaks. Browsershot sidesteps all of that by rendering your Blade view in headless Chrome and printing the result to PDF — meaning if it looks right in a browser, it looks right in the PDF. This tutorial builds an invoice generator for PhpArchitect's billing system.

Step 1: Install Browsershot

composer require spatie/browsershot

Browsershot shells out to Puppeteer, which needs Node and Chrome available on the server:

npm install puppeteer

On a fresh Ubuntu server you'll also need Chrome's runtime dependencies; Spatie's documentation has a copy-paste apt-get list for exactly this.

Step 2: Build the invoice view

{{-- resources/views/invoices/pdf.blade.php --}}
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <style>
        body { font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; color: #1f2937; }
        .header { display: flex; justify-content: space-between; margin-bottom: 40px; }
        table { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; }
        th, td { padding: 8px 12px; text-align: left; border-bottom: 1px solid #e5e7eb; }
        .total-row td { font-weight: bold; border-top: 2px solid #1f2937; }
    </style>
</head>
<body>
    <div class="header">
        <div>
            <h1>PHP Architect</h1>
            <p>{{ $invoice->company_address }}</p>
        </div>
        <div>
            <h2>Invoice #{{ $invoice->number }}</h2>
            <p>Due {{ $invoice->due_at->format('M j, Y') }}</p>
        </div>
    </div>

    <table>
        <thead>
            <tr><th>Description</th><th>Qty</th><th>Price</th><th>Subtotal</th></tr>
        </thead>
        <tbody>
            @foreach ($invoice->lineItems as $item)
                <tr>
                    <td>{{ $item->description }}</td>
                    <td>{{ $item->quantity }}</td>
                    <td>${{ number_format($item->price, 2) }}</td>
                    <td>${{ number_format($item->quantity * $item->price, 2) }}</td>
                </tr>
            @endforeach
            <tr class="total-row">
                <td colspan="3">Total</td>
                <td>${{ number_format($invoice->total, 2) }}</td>
            </tr>
        </tbody>
    </table>
</body>
</html>

Step 3: Render it to PDF

namespace App\Actions;

use App\Models\Invoice;
use Spatie\Browsershot\Browsershot;

class GenerateInvoicePdf
{
    public function handle(Invoice $invoice): string
    {
        $html = view('invoices.pdf', ['invoice' => $invoice])->render();

        $path = storage_path("app/invoices/invoice-{$invoice->number}.pdf");

        Browsershot::html($html)
            ->format('A4')
            ->margins(20, 20, 20, 20)
            ->showBackground()
            ->save($path);

        return $path;
    }
}

showBackground() matters here — Chrome strips background colors and images from printed output by default, which silently breaks any styled header or table.

Step 4: Stream it as a download

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use App\Actions\GenerateInvoicePdf;
use App\Models\Invoice;

class InvoiceDownloadController extends Controller
{
    public function __invoke(Invoice $invoice, GenerateInvoicePdf $generator)
    {
        $path = $generator->handle($invoice);

        return response()->download($path, "invoice-{$invoice->number}.pdf")
            ->deleteFileAfterSend();
    }
}

deleteFileAfterSend() cleans up the temporary file once the response finishes streaming, so you're not accumulating generated PDFs on disk for invoices nobody re-downloads.

Step 5: Queue it for bulk generation

Rendering Chrome per invoice is not free — expect somewhere in the range of a few hundred milliseconds to a couple of seconds depending on page complexity. For a "generate PDFs for all of this month's invoices" admin action, queue each one instead of blocking a request:

namespace App\Jobs;

use App\Actions\GenerateInvoicePdf;
use App\Models\Invoice;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Queue\Queueable;

class GenerateInvoicePdfJob implements ShouldQueue
{
    use Queueable;

    public function __construct(private readonly Invoice $invoice) {}

    public function handle(GenerateInvoicePdf $generator): void
    {
        $path = $generator->handle($this->invoice);

        $this->invoice->update(['pdf_path' => $path]);
    }
}

A note on server resources