I think we’ve gotten to a good point with Imports in the previous 8 articles. It’s time to switch to exporting data into Excel sheets. Laravel-Excel is pretty amazing. It simplifies all of this for us.

Since we’ve been working with our User model this whole time, let’s create a quick export. First thing is to create our Exporter and specify that we want to use the User model.

php artisan make:export UsersExport --model=User

This generates a new file and a new directory under the app directory called app/Exports/UsersExport.php.

<?php

namespace App\Exports;

use App\Models\User;
use Maatwebsite\Excel\Concerns\FromCollection;

class UsersExport implements FromCollection
{
    /**
    * @return \Illuminate\Support\Collection
    */
    public function collection()
    {
        return User::all();
    }
}

As you can see, it returns all of our users as a collection. We now have to call the export. We’ll create our export_users method in our UserController and then create a route that calls that method.

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

//...
use App\Exports\UsersExport;
use App\Models\User;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Maatwebsite\Excel\Facades\Excel;

class UserController extends Controller
{
    //...

    public function export_users() {
        return Excel::download(
            new UsersExport,
            'users.xlsx'
        );
    }
}

First thing to note is that we are using the download method from Excel. Next thing to note is that we’re returning it. The return triggers the download to occur. The download will be named users.xlsx.

<?php

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;
use App\Http\Controllers\UserController;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Artisan;

//...

Route::get(
    '/export-users',
    [UserController::class, 'export_users']
);

Look at all those users. This was just a quick intro. Once you get it going, we’ll continue with some more advanced stuff like creating multiple sheets.