Running on Laravel Vapor

[akhan619]

Summary

Below one can find instructions on how to set this up on Laravel Vapor.

Step 1

Since we need to install custom packages, one cannot use the existing runtimes that Vapor offers. We will need to create a docker runtime. I am doing this for the staging environment as an example.
Change the staging environment in vapor.yml file as follows:

• runtime: 'php-8.0:al2'

to

• runtime: docker

Step 2

Create a staging.Dockerfile with the following content. Note that you need pango-dev instead of pango. Even though alpine linux repos list pango as an available download, couldn't get this to work. Also, the instructions are for installing weasyprint without using python environments. Here are the contents of the dockerfile.

FROM laravelphp/vapor:php80

RUN apk update

RUN apk add py3-pip py3-pillow py3-cffi py3-brotli gcc musl-dev python3-dev pango-dev font-noto

RUN pip install weasyprint

COPY . /var/task

Step 3

Now how you will use weasyprint package in your project is up to you. Below is a simple example to show it works. Add a route to web.php

use WeasyPrint\Facade as WeasyPrint;

Route::get('/', function () {
    $source = '<p>WeasyPrint rocks!</p>';
    $service = WeasyPrint::prepareSource($source);
    
    return $service->inline('document.pdf', ['X-Vapor-Base64-Encode' => 'True']);
});

Final Step

Now you can deploy to vapor with vapor deploy staging.

Thoughts

First off kudos to @mikerockett for creating the package. Great work! Getting a html to pdf package working on vapor isn't easy. I tried many of the popular ones, but the ones that work easily like dompdf don't have the latest css support. Others which use a rendering engine like wkhtmltopdf have very old rendering engines.

The best could have been puppeteer on chromium, but that just doesn't run on Vapor. Still trying to get it running. But really loved the ease of WeasyPrint and this wrapper which just works! And sometimes that is all that matters.

Cheers!