PDFs from spatie/laravel-pdf have no CSS when vite is not running

[michaelpapesch]

I create PDFs with spatie/laravel-pdf on Laravel 11, styled with TailwindCSS.
My layout has

@vite(['resources/css/app.css'])

I was working locally with vite running. PDfs were looking great.

My deployment includes building the css with

npm ci
npm run build
rm -rf node_modules

The website renders just fine with the built stylesheets from /build/assets/....

But: When I deployed my app to my forge server, the PDFs were missing the stylesheet after generation.

I tried motomedialab/laravel-vite-helper and including the CSS with variants of

<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ vite('resources/css/app.css', 'build', false, false) }}">

and even

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/build/assets/app-Bq_2mYPq.css">

This did both not work. But I want to use my build CSS, and not keeping vite running 24/7 on my production server.

I think i am missing some fundamental information here. How is this supposed to work?

Sry for crossposting from SA, I will update my posts, if i get an answer.

[michaelpapesch]

Ok, someone found a solution. Just include the CSS inline in the template like this:

<style>{!! Vite::content('resources/css/app.css') !!}</style>

https://stackoverflow.com/a/79468205/2956946

I am not sure, if this is the intended behaviour, but it works for me. So I will mark this question as resolved