Setup for Laravel Forge that worked for me

[intrepidws]

This took awhile and it seems like many others have similar problems, so I wanted to share what I did that worked for me. I pulled little bits from a variety of places, which I will do my best to cite.

Setup for Local Development with Laravel Herd
This was pretty simple, I just followed these instructions from Spatie. I ran npm install puppeteer and it worked fine locally.

Setup for Laravel Forge
This is where things got complicated and confusing.

• Run node -v to ensure that Node is installed and at least version 22
• If it is not version 22, follow these upgrade instructions from the Laravel Forge Cookbook
• Install Puppeteer using the Spatie provided instructions
• From here, I got the the installed Chrome path and put this into an env variable, like this: BROWSERSHOT_CHROME_PATH="/home/forge/.cache/puppeteer/chrome/linux-137.0.7151.70/chrome-linux64/chrome"

Code Changes
Code changes are necessary only in Laravel Forge and not in local development, so whenever I call the Pdf facade, I use this code:

return Pdf::view('templateName', [])
    ->withBrowsershot(function (Browsershot $browsershot) {
        if (! App::environment('local')) {
            $browsershot
                ->setChromePath(env('BROWSERSHOT_CHROME_PATH')) // Use manually installed Chromium
                ->setCustomTempPath(storage_path('temp'))       // Custom temp directory for server compatibility
                ->noSandbox()                                   // Disable sandbox for headless Chromium compatibility
                ->newHeadless();                                // Run Chromium in headless mode
        }
    });

Shout out this post by @RedskyThirty for the code changes. He seemed to have a longer term issue with them, but so far so good for me.