The Challenge

Laravel Cloud is a powerful serverless platform that handles scaling, deployments, and infrastructure for you. But that convenience comes with a trade-off: you can't install system-level dependencies like Chrome or Puppeteer.

This means traditional PDF generation approaches that rely on headless browsers simply won't work. You're stuck with limited alternatives that can't handle modern CSS or Tailwind.

Why Current Solutions Fall Short

DomPDF

DomPDF is the go-to choice for many Laravel developers, but it has significant limitations:

No Flexbox or Grid support - Modern layouts break completely
Limited CSS support - Many properties are ignored or poorly rendered
No Tailwind CSS - Utility classes won't work as expected
Poor font handling - Custom fonts require manual setup and often fail

If your invoices or reports use any modern CSS, DomPDF will produce broken, ugly output.

wkhtmltopdf

Once a popular choice, wkhtmltopdf is now deprecated and unmaintained:

Uses an outdated WebKit engine from 2012
Security vulnerabilities that will never be patched
Not available on Laravel Cloud anyway
Poor CSS3 support

Self-hosted Puppeteer

Puppeteer with headless Chrome produces pixel-perfect PDFs, but:

Not possible on Laravel Cloud - You can't install Chrome
Even if you could, Chrome consumes 500MB+ of memory per instance
Requires complex orchestration and worker processes

The TailPDF Solution

TailPDF is a PDF API built specifically for modern web applications. Instead of running Chrome on your server, you make an HTTP request and get a PDF back.

Why it works on Laravel Cloud:

No dependencies to install - Just HTTP calls
Perfect Tailwind CSS rendering - Every utility class works
Sub-second generation - CSS asset caching makes it fast
Scales automatically - We handle the Chrome instances

Quick Start

Install the TailPDF Laravel package via Composer:

composer require mralston/tailpdf

Add your API key to .env:

TAILPDF_API_KEY=your-api-key-here

Generate a PDF from your Blade view:

use Mralston\Tailpdf\Facades\TailPdf;

// Render a Blade view to PDF and download
return TailPdf::view('invoices.show', ['invoice' => $invoice])
    ->pdf()
    ->download('invoice.pdf');

Or stream directly to the browser:

use Mralston\Tailpdf\Facades\TailPdf;

// Stream PDF to browser
return TailPdf::view('invoices.show', ['invoice' => $invoice])
    ->pdf()
    ->stream();

Save to disk:

use Mralston\Tailpdf\Facades\TailPdf;

// Save PDF to storage
TailPdf::view('reports.monthly', ['data' => $data])
    ->pdf()
    ->save('reports/monthly.pdf');

What You Get

Pixel-perfect output - Your PDFs look exactly like your web designs
Full Tailwind support - All utility classes, including arbitrary values
CSS Grid & Flexbox - Modern layouts just work
Custom fonts - Google Fonts and web fonts supported
Fast generation - Average 400ms response time
Async jobs - Generate PDFs in the background for large batches

Stop fighting with PDF libraries. Start generating beautiful PDFs in minutes.

Generate PDFs on Laravel Cloud