README

This package provides a flipbook style PDF viewer for Laravel projects. The PDF viewer is designed to be used out of the box without any implementation required, provided that the required public assets are published. However, the package supports customization of the PDF viewer by allowing for the built-in Blade view files to be published to your project. The PDF viewer can also be embedded directly into any Blade or Vue component to respond to trigger events as a popup dialog.

Installation

Install the package:

composer require wai/flipbook

Publish the required asset files:

php artisan flipbook:install

Optionally publish the Blade view files for customization:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Wai\FlipBook\FlipBookServiceProvider" --tag="views" --force

Scheduled Commands

This package supports optional caching of retrieved PDF files. To enable this feature, first publish the config file:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Wai\FlipBook\FlipBookServiceProvider" --tag="config"

The config file will be accessible in your project's config folder:

/config/flipbook.php

After enabling the cache config option, this package will run a scheduled command once a day to clean up stale PDFs that have not been viewed for several days. See the following link for running the scheduler:

https://laravel.com/docs/11.x/scheduling#running-the-scheduler

Usage

The necessary controller and routes are set up so that the PDF viewer can be accessed immediately once the package is installed. To access the PDF viewer simply pass the full URL of the PDF you wish to view to the following route:

/pdf?url=full-url-here

For example:

https://example.com/pdf?url=https://example.com/example

You may additionally pass a custom placeholder message for if the PDF cannot be retrieved from the designated URL:

https://example.com/pdf?url=https://example.com/example&text=Not%20found

Customization

Should you need to customize aspects of the PDF viewer, the published Blade view files can be found at the following path inside your project:

/resources/views/vendor/flipbook/

The published public assets (CSS, JS) can be found at:

/public/flipbook/

Local Development

Install composer dependencies:

composer install

Add the package to a local project's composer.json:

{
  "scripts": { ... },

  "repositories": [
    {
      "type": "path",
      "url": "../path/to/local/git/repo/flipbook"
    }
  ]
}

Install the package:

composer require wai/flipbook

Before committing changes, increment the version number specified in the package's composer.json. Additionally, create a new tag on Bitbucket matching the version number of the package.