Quote PDFs in Laravel

Why quotes become PDFs

A quote is an offer with an expiry, and it gets forwarded to people who will never log into your product. It has to stand alone and it has to be fixed at the moment it was sent. That is the difference between a document and a view of a database, and it is why sales teams keep asking for this.

What a quote has to carry

Before any of the code below matters, the template has to produce a document that is actually a quote. These are the fields that make it one, and the ones a reader or an auditor will look for first.

• a quote reference, which the eventual order will cite
• the validity date, after which the pricing no longer stands
• each line with the price offered, which may not be list price
• any discount shown as a discount rather than folded into the unit price
• the terms attached to the offer: payment schedule, lead time, exclusions

Turning your Blade template into a document

You already have the markup. View("invoices.pdf", $data)->render() gives you it as a string, which is the only input the render needs. asset() and mix()/vite() emit URLs built from APP_URL. If APP_URL is still http://localhost in the environment that renders, every stylesheet and image in the document silently fails to load and you get a plain-text-looking PDF with no error.

The Laravel implementation

the Http facade is the client most projects here already have. The render happens in a controller returning streamDownload, and you return response()->streamDownload, which never holds the file.

<?php
// app/Http/Controllers/QuoteController.php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use App\Models\Quote;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Http;

class QuoteController extends Controller
{
    public function pdf(Quote $quote)
    {
        // A Blade view built for print. Do not reuse the on-screen view: it pulls
        // in the app layout and the asset tags, which cannot resolve here.
        $html = view('quotes.pdf', ['quote' => $quote])->render();

        $upstream = Http::withToken(config('services.pdfpipe.key'))
            ->timeout(60)
            ->withOptions(['stream' => true])
            ->post('https://api.pdfpipe.xyz/v1/pdf', [
                'html' => $html,
                'options' => ['format' => 'A4', 'printBackground' => true],
            ])
            ->throw();

        return response()->streamDownload(
            fn () => fpassthru($upstream->getBody()->detach()),
            "quote-{$quote->reference}.pdf",
            ['Content-Type' => 'application/pdf'],
        );
    }
}

The CSS that makes a quote page correctly

The layout problem specific to this document is that optional line items and discount blocks make the length unpredictable, so the signature area must not orphan onto a page of its own. These rules handle it.

/* Backgrounds are dropped unless printBackground is set on the
   request, which is the usual reason a document renders in plain
   black and white when it looked right in the browser. */
@page {
  size: A4;
  margin: 18mm 16mm;
}

table { break-inside: avoid; }
h2    { break-after: avoid; }

What goes wrong in Laravel

Blade views for PDFs get built by copying the on-screen view, which brings @vite, the app layout and the Livewire scripts with it. Those either fail to resolve or render as visible artefacts. Start the PDF view from an empty file.

What people try first

Most Laravel projects reach for barryvdh/laravel-dompdf, which is convenient because it installs with Composer and needs nothing else, and limiting because dompdf implements its own layout engine with no support for flexbox or grid. That works until it is running on more than one machine, at which point the browser becomes the thing you operate rather than the thing you use.

Where the quote lives afterwards

Rendering is the short part. A quote is dead once it expires or converts, so retention is short and driven by the sales system rather than by law. What matters is that the version the customer received is the one you can produce later, because a disputed price is settled by the document that was sent.

Getting the document right

• Check the validity date, since a quote without one is an open-ended commitment.
• Generation is triggered by a salesperson sending it, so latency is felt directly by a person waiting, so size the timeout for that path rather than for a health check.
• These are produced one at a time by a person who is waiting, so latency is felt directly.
• Backgrounds are painted by default here, so a design that uses colour needs nothing set. Only an explicit print_background of false turns them off.

Frequently asked

Related

Other Laravel documents, and the same quote in other stacks.