How to Take Screenshots and Generate PDFs in PHP (Without wkhtmltopdf)

PHP PDF generation has always been painful. wkhtmltopdf requires a binary installation and struggles with modern CSS and JavaScript. Dompdf is pure PHP but can't render JavaScript-heavy pages. mPDF is similar. Browsershot (Spatie) wraps Puppeteer, which means Node.js on your server.

Here's the clean path: one HTTP request, binary response, no system dependencies.

Screenshot from a URL

<?php

function screenshot(string $url): string
{
    $ch = curl_init('https://pagebolt.dev/api/v1/screenshot');
    curl_setopt_array($ch, [
        CURLOPT_POST => true,
        CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
        CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => [
            'x-api-key: ' . $_ENV['PAGEBOLT_API_KEY'],
            'Content-Type: application/json',
        ],
        CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => json_encode([
            'url' => $url,
            'fullPage' => true,
            'blockBanners' => true,
        ]),
    ]);
    $result = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    return $result;
}

// Save to disk
file_put_contents('screenshot.png', screenshot('https://example.com'));

PDF from a URL

function pdfFromUrl(string $url): string
{
    $ch = curl_init('https://pagebolt.dev/api/v1/pdf');
    curl_setopt_array($ch, [
        CURLOPT_POST => true,
        CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
        CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => [
            'x-api-key: ' . $_ENV['PAGEBOLT_API_KEY'],
            'Content-Type: application/json',
        ],
        CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => json_encode([
            'url' => $url,
            'blockBanners' => true,
        ]),
    ]);
    $result = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    return $result;
}

file_put_contents('page.pdf', pdfFromUrl('https://yourapp.com/invoice/1042'));

PDF from HTML (replacing wkhtmltopdf / Dompdf)

Render your PHP template to an HTML string first, then send it:

function pdfFromHtml(string $html): string
{
    $ch = curl_init('https://pagebolt.dev/api/v1/pdf');
    curl_setopt_array($ch, [
        CURLOPT_POST => true,
        CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
        CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => [
            'x-api-key: ' . $_ENV['PAGEBOLT_API_KEY'],
            'Content-Type: application/json',
        ],
        CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => json_encode(['html' => $html]),
    ]);
    $result = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    return $result;
}

// Build your HTML however you like
ob_start();
include 'templates/invoice.php';
$html = ob_get_clean();

$pdf = pdfFromHtml($html);
file_put_contents("invoice-{$invoiceId}.pdf", $pdf);

Laravel controller example

use Illuminate\Http\Response;

class InvoiceController extends Controller
{
    public function download(Invoice $invoice): Response
    {
        $html = view('invoices.pdf', compact('invoice'))->render();

        $ch = curl_init('https://pagebolt.dev/api/v1/pdf');
        curl_setopt_array($ch, [
            CURLOPT_POST => true,
            CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
            CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => [
                'x-api-key: ' . env('PAGEBOLT_API_KEY'),
                'Content-Type: application/json',
            ],
            CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => json_encode(['html' => $html]),
        ]);
        $pdf = curl_exec($ch);
        curl_close($ch);

        return response($pdf, 200, [
            'Content-Type' => 'application/pdf',
            'Content-Disposition' => "attachment; filename=\"invoice-{$invoice->id}.pdf\"",
        ]);
    }
}

No Composer package, no binary, no Node.js. The Blade template renders as normal — just swap the PDF generation step.

Deployment

No buildpacks, no apt-get, no binary layer. Works on shared hosting, Heroku, Laravel Forge, or any PHP environment with outbound HTTPS. Add PAGEBOLT_API_KEY to your .env and deploy as normal.

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