Laravel 11 Generate PDF and Send Email Tutorial

In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to generate a PDF and send it via email using Laravel 11. Laravel makes these tasks straightforward with its rich set of tools and libraries. We’ll use the barryvdh/laravel-dompdf package for generating PDFs and Laravel’s built-in mail functionality to send emails.

Prerequisites

Before we start, make sure you have the following:

Laravel 11 installed
Basic knowledge of Laravel
Composer installed

Step 1: Setting Up Laravel Project

If you haven’t set up a Laravel project yet, you can create a new one by running:

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel laravel-pdf-email-tutorial

Navigate to the project directory:

cd laravel-pdf-email-tutorial

Step 2: Install DomPDF Package

We will use the barryvdh/laravel-dompdf package to generate PDFs. Install it using Composer:

composer require barryvdh/laravel-dompdf

After installing the package, register the service provider in the config/app.php file:

'providers' => [
    // Other service providers...
    Barryvdh\DomPDF\ServiceProvider::class,
],

'aliases' => [
    // Other aliases...
    'PDF' => Barryvdh\DomPDF\Facade::class,
],

Step 3: Create a Route for Generating PDF

We’ll create a simple route to generate and view a PDF. Open the routes/web.php file and add the following route:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;
use App\Http\Controllers\PDFController;

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

Step 4: Create PDFController

Next, we need to create a controller to handle the PDF generation logic. Run the following command to generate a controller:

php artisan make:controller PDFController

Open the newly created PDFController.php and add the following code:

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use PDF;

class PDFController extends Controller
{
    public function generatePDF()
    {
        $data = [
            'title' => 'Welcome to Laravel PDF Tutorial',
            'date' => date('m/d/Y'),
        ];

        $pdf = PDF::loadView('pdf.myPDF', $data);

        return $pdf->download('tutorial.pdf');
    }
}

Step 5: Create a View for the PDF

Create a view that will be converted to a PDF. In the resources/views directory, create a new folder named pdf and a file named myPDF.blade.php:

mkdir resources/views/pdf
touch resources/views/pdf/myPDF.blade.php

Open the myPDF.blade.php file and add the following HTML code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>{{ $title }}</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>{{ $title }}</h1>
    <p>Generated on {{ $date }}</p>
</body>
</html>

Step 6: Sending the PDF via Email

To send the generated PDF via email, we need to create a mailable class. Run the following command:

php artisan make:mail PDFMail

Open the PDFMail.php file in the app/Mail directory and modify it as follows:

namespace App\Mail;

use Illuminate\Bus\Queueable;
use Illuminate\Mail\Mailable;
use Illuminate\Queue\SerializesModels;
use PDF;

class PDFMail extends Mailable
{
    use Queueable, SerializesModels;

    public function build()
    {
        $data = [
            'title' => 'Welcome to Laravel PDF Tutorial',
            'date' => date('m/d/Y'),
        ];

        $pdf = PDF::loadView('pdf.myPDF', $data);

        return $this->view('emails.pdf')
                    ->subject('Your PDF is ready')
                    ->attachData($pdf->output(), 'tutorial.pdf');
    }
}

Step 7: Create an Email View

Create an email view that will be used to send the PDF. In the resources/views/emails directory, create a file named pdf.blade.php:

mkdir resources/views/emails
touch resources/views/emails/pdf.blade.php

Open the pdf.blade.php file and add the following HTML code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>PDF Email</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Your PDF is attached</h1>
    <p>Please find the attached PDF document.</p>
</body>
</html>

Step 8: Create a Route for Sending the Email

Finally, create a route to send the email. Open the routes/web.php file and add the following route:

use App\Mail\PDFMail;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Mail;

Route::get('/send-pdf-email', function () {
    Mail::to('recipient@example.com')->send(new PDFMail());
    return 'Email has been sent!';
});

Replace recipient@example.com with the actual recipient’s email address.

Conclusion

That’s it! You’ve successfully created a Laravel application that generates a PDF and sends it via email. You can customize the PDF content and email view as per your requirements.

To test the functionality, you can run the Laravel development server:

php artisan serve

Visit http://localhost:8000/generate-pdf to download the PDF, and http://localhost:8000/send-pdf-email to send the PDF via email.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions or run into any issues!

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