Laravel Invoice Tutorial 📘 - PHP

Introduction

This tutorial will guide you through building an invoice generation system using Laravel, a popular PHP framework. Invoicing is an essential feature for many applications, and Laravel provides a powerful and flexible platform for creating and managing invoices.

In this tutorial, we will cover the following topics:

1. Setting up a Laravel project
2. Creating a database schema for invoices
3. Building the invoice model and migration
4. Implementing CRUD operations for invoices
5. Generating PDF invoices using Laravel
6. Styling the invoice template with CSS
7. Sending invoices via email
8. Handling payments and generating receipts

Throughout the tutorial, we will provide code snippets and explanations to help you understand each step. Let's dive in!

Prerequisites

To follow along with this tutorial, you'll need the following prerequisites:

1. Basic knowledge of PHP and Laravel
2. Familiarity with HTML and CSS
3. A development environment with PHP, Composer, and a database (e.g., MySQL, SQLite)

Setup

Before we begin, let's set up a new Laravel project by following these steps:

1. Run the following command to install Laravel:

composer global require laravel/installer

2. Create a new Laravel project:

laravel new invoice-generator

3. Navigate to the project directory:

cd invoice-generator

4. Start the development server:

php artisan serve

Now, you should have a new Laravel project up and running.

Database Schema

To store invoices in our application, we need to design a suitable database schema. Here's a suggested schema:

• invoices table:
  • id (primary key)
  • invoice_number
  • client_name
  • total_amount
  • created_at
  • updated_at

We will use Laravel migrations to create this schema. Run the following command to generate the migration file:

php artisan make:migration create_invoices_table --create=invoices

In the created migration file, define the schema as mentioned above using the up() method.

// database/migrations/YYYY_MM_DD_HHmmSS_create_invoices_table.php

use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;

class CreateInvoicesTable extends Migration
{
    /**
     * Run the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::create('invoices', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->id();
            $table->string('invoice_number');
            $table->string('client_name');
            $table->float('total_amount');
            $table->timestamps();
        });
    }

    // ...
}

Once you have defined the migration, run the migration command to create the invoices table in the database:

php artisan migrate

Now, we have the required database schema set up for our invoices.

[To be continued...]