Saving HTML contents of view to disk

Level 7

You can do it using

$html = View::make('index')->render();
// Or
$html = view('index')->render();

That will return the html itself

2 likes

Level 3

I tried both but the file is still empty. It's not a restriction problem since the file can be created + I am on XAMPP on Windows.

No clue where this comes from.

Level 65

How about testing with file_put_contents()?

Level 3

file_put_contents() also produces an empty file.

Edit: If I use hardcoded text it works. But the rendered HTML is not getting stored (file_put_contents() and File::put())

pmall

Level 56

What is the content of your view ?

Level 65

Have you tested the ->render() returns a string?

Level 3

@pmall My view is simply a blade file which contains 2 sections and extends to the master blade template. So kinda like this:

<!--master.blade.php-->
<DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        ....
        <title>@yield('title')</title>
        ...
    </head>
    <body>
        <div>
            ...
            @yield('content')
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

And the extending blade:

<!--index.blade.php-->
@extends('master')
@section('title', 'Inndex')

@section('content')
<div>
    ...
</div>
@stop

@bashy : From the docs (http://laravel.com/api/5.1/Illuminate/View/View.html#method_render ) it should but testing like this:

    $html = view('index')->render();
    $res = $html === '' ? 'true' : 'false';
    return $res;

returns the page in the web browser but not true or false

pmall

Level 56

So render seems like to be echoing the string instead of returning it.

What if you do this ?

ob_start();
view('index')->render();
$content = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();

File::put(public_path() . '/static/index.html', $content);

Level 3

It sadly creates an empty index.html. Man I think I will just save the f*cking sites via Firebug.

Level 65

Seems there another issue with your code somewhere or you haven't tested the saving of the file. Permissions?

This works

$view = view('view.name');

$contents = (string) $view;
// or
$contents = $view->render();

file_put_contents('filename.html', $contents);

1 like

Level 3

@bashy: I don't think it is an issue with persmission since something like

file_put_contents(public_path() . '/static/index.html', "lsdflaflöksd");

works.

I think I will try to get a fresh install of laravel. Something is fishy here.