Quickstart — your first PDF in CodeIgniter 4

At a glance

Resolve the pdf service in a controller, add content to its document, and return a download response. That gives you a Portable Document Format (PDF) file in three lines and one Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) response.

Install

composer require nextpdf/codeigniter

For requirements and package discovery checks, see /integrations/codeigniter/install/.

Step 1 — Generate a controller

Create a controller that returns a PDF. The Pdf library creates a fresh document for you, then turns that document into a CodeIgniter DownloadResponse.

Every PHP sample on this page puts declare(strict_types=1); after the opening tag, on its own line (PSR-12 §x1.x3.p11; §x1.x3.p34).

<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

namespace App\Controllers;

use CodeIgniter\HTTP\DownloadResponse;
use NextPDF\CodeIgniter\Config\Services;

final class InvoiceController extends BaseController
{
    public function download(int $id): DownloadResponse
    {
        $pdf = Services::pdf();

        $pdf->document()->addPage();
        $pdf->document()->cell(0, 10, "Invoice #{$id}");

        return $pdf->download("invoice-{$id}.pdf");
    }
}

Services::pdf() returns a fresh Pdf. The package’s functional test suite verifies that its underlying document is fresh on every call too. The download() call produces a DownloadResponse with the attachment disposition.

Step 2 — Add a route

Map a route to the controller method in app/Config/Routes.php:

$routes->get('invoices/(:num)/pdf', 'InvoiceController::download/$1');

Step 3 — Request the PDF

Open /invoices/42/pdf. Your browser downloads invoice-42.pdf. The response includes Content-Type: application/pdf and the package’s response-hardening headers.

Variation — inline preview with the helper

The global pdf() helper is equivalent to Services::pdf(). Call inline() to show the PDF in the browser instead of downloading it:

<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

namespace App\Controllers;

use CodeIgniter\HTTP\DownloadResponse;

final class ReportController extends BaseController
{
    public function preview(): DownloadResponse
    {
        $pdf = pdf();

        $pdf->document()->addPage();
        $pdf->document()->cell(0, 10, 'Monthly Report');

        return $pdf->inline('report.pdf');
    }
}

Variation — direct document and PdfResponse

If you already have a Document, build the response directly with PdfResponse. The pdf_document() helper gives you a fresh, pre-configured document.

<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

namespace App\Controllers;

use CodeIgniter\HTTP\DownloadResponse;
use NextPDF\CodeIgniter\Http\PdfResponse;

final class DocumentController extends BaseController
{
    public function generate(): DownloadResponse
    {
        $document = pdf_document();
        $document->addPage();
        $document->cell(0, 10, 'Hello World');

        return PdfResponse::download($document, 'hello.pdf');
    }
}

What you built

A controller that resolves a NextPDF service and returns a typed DownloadResponse.
Two equivalent entry points: the Services class and the pdf() / pdf_document() helpers.
A response with application/pdf, the package security headers, and a sanitized filename.

Next steps

To keep this first introduction focused, this tutorial leaves out error handling. For production controllers with dependency injection, exception handling, observability, and the queue job, continue to /integrations/codeigniter/production-usage/. That page shows you the hardened variants.

Conformance

PHP opening tag on its own line in code samples (PSR-12 Extended Coding Style §x1.x3.p11).
declare(strict_types=1) statement form in code samples (PSR-12 Extended Coding Style §x1.x3.p34).