Laravel Gotenberg Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Document generation features (invoices, reports, contracts, statements): This package wraps Gotenberg — a stateless Docker service that converts HTML/Markdown/Office files to PDF — into a Laravel-native API. It lets the team ship PDF output without writing a bespoke conversion pipeline or hand-rolling HTTP calls to Gotenberg.
• Build vs. buy: Effectively "adopt vs. build." Instead of building HTML→PDF conversion in-house (headless Chrome, LibreOffice, font handling, concurrency, memory limits), the team delegates rendering to Gotenberg and keeps only the Laravel-side orchestration. This package is the thin integration layer — low lock-in, since Gotenberg itself is an external service.
• Reliability of downstream delivery: The v1.0.3 fix ("saving the PDF to the local filesystem") directly affects workflows where generated PDFs are persisted to disk before being emailed, queued for archival, or attached to records. Prior to this fix, local-save paths were suspect — a correctness risk for anything that depends on files actually landing on storage (e.g., audit trails, async jobs that re-read the file later).
• Use cases: Invoice/receipt generation, report exports, certificate or letter generation, converting user-supplied Office documents to PDF, screenshot-style "print this page" features.
• Roadmap signal: The package is at v1.0.x, actively maintained, with automated dependency hygiene (Dependabot) — a reasonable signal for a stable-but-early integration dependency. No new features in this release, so no roadmap expansion is implied; the decision here is adoption/continuation, not new capability.

When to Consider This Package

Adopt when:

• You need server-side PDF generation from HTML/CSS templates and want high-fidelity rendering (Gotenberg uses Chromium under the hood), which is typically better than pure-PHP PDF libraries for design-heavy documents.
• You already run (or are willing to run) Docker in your infrastructure — Gotenberg is a separate service, so there is an operational dependency to host, monitor, and scale.
• You want a thin Laravel wrapper rather than maintaining your own Gotenberg client, and you're comfortable with a young package (v1.0.x).
• Your volume is moderate-to-high and you'd rather scale a rendering service horizontally than push rendering into PHP workers.

Look elsewhere when:

• You cannot add a sidecar/container to your deployment (shared hosting, constrained PaaS) — consider a pure-PHP library (e.g., Dompdf, Browsershot if you can run Chrome) or a hosted PDF API instead.
• You only ever need trivial, low-fidelity PDFs and want zero extra infrastructure.
• You require a mature, long-track-record dependency with a large ecosystem; at v1.0.x the wrapper is early, so evaluate escape hatches (the Gotenberg HTTP API is standard, so replacing the wrapper is feasible).
• Data-residency/compliance rules forbid sending documents to an external service — though Gotenberg can be self-hosted, which mitigates this versus SaaS PDF APIs.

On this release specifically: v1.0.3 is a patch — a bug fix for local filesystem saving plus routine dependency bumps (GitHub Actions: checkout 4→5, git-auto-commit 6→7, fetch-metadata 2.4.0→2.5.0). No breaking changes, no deprecations, no new features. It is a low-risk upgrade and worth taking if you rely on saving PDFs locally; it does not change the adoption calculus.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For executives: We can add professional PDF document generation (invoices, reports, contracts) without building a rendering engine ourselves. This package is a small, free, open-source connector between our Laravel app and Gotenberg, a standard open-source document-conversion service. It keeps us from reinventing a solved problem, and because the conversion engine is a separate, widely-used service, we are not locked in — we could swap the connector later with modest effort. The latest patch (v1.0.3) fixes a bug where generated PDFs might not be saved correctly to local storage, and refreshes build tooling; it's a routine, low-risk upgrade.

For engineering: This is a Laravel wrapper around Gotenberg's HTTP API. It gives us a clean, framework-native interface for HTML/Office→PDF conversion and handles the HTTP plumbing. v1.0.3 fixes local filesystem persistence of the generated PDF and bumps three GitHub Actions dependencies — no API or behavior changes. Operational cost is a Gotenberg container to deploy, monitor, and scale; the payoff is Chromium-grade rendering fidelity without maintaining Chrome/LibreOffice in our app servers. Recommend adopting for document features and taking the patch if we use the local-save path; flag that the wrapper is v1.0.x, so pin versions and keep the Gotenberg API as the fallback interface.