Generate a PDF in Laravel

The simplest way to generate a PDF in Laravel is to call the Docweave API with the built-in Http facade — no headless browser to install, configure, or keep running on your server.

Generate a PDF in Laravel with the Http facade

POST HTML to /api/v1/pdf using Laravel's Http facade (Guzzle under the hood), then write the response body to disk with Storage:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Http;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Storage;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;

class PdfController extends Controller
{
    public function generate(Request $request): Response
    {
        $response = Http::withToken(config('services.docweave.key'))
            ->withHeaders(['Accept' => 'application/pdf'])
            ->post('https://docweave.dev/api/v1/pdf', [
                'source' => [
                    'type' => 'html',
                    'html' => '<h1>Hello from Laravel</h1><p>Rendered by Docweave.</p>',
                ],
                'options' => ['format' => 'A4'],
                'idempotencyKey' => 'laravel-example-001',
            ]);

        if ($response->failed()) {
            abort(502, 'Docweave request failed: ' . $response->status());
        }

        Storage::disk('local')->put('pdfs/hello.pdf', $response->body());

        return response($response->body(), 200)
            ->header('Content-Type', 'application/pdf');
    }
}

Register the API key in config/services.php

Keep the key out of source control by reading it from env() through the standard services config, the same way Laravel wires up Stripe or Mailgun:

// config/services.php

return [
    // ...existing entries

    'docweave' => [
        'key' => env('DOCWEAVE_API_KEY'),
    ],
];

…or from an AI agent

The same request works without any Laravel code at all. Run npx @docweave/mcp and an AI agent gets a generate_pdf tool that wraps this same orchestration:

// From an AI agent over MCP — no HTTP client, no Laravel app required:
generate_pdf({
  source: {
    type: "html",
    html: "<h1>Hello from Laravel</h1><p>Rendered by Docweave.</p>"
  },
  outputPath: "/tmp/hello.pdf"
})

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