Laravel Excel

Laravel Excel is a Laravel-native wrapper around PhpSpreadsheet that turns exporting and importing spreadsheets into a first-class, Eloquent-friendly workflow. Instead of hand-rolling PhpSpreadsheet calls, you define export/import classes that describe what data to output or how to map incoming rows to models, and the package handles the file generation, streaming, and reading.

For large datasets it adds queued exports/imports, chunked reading, and batched inserts so multi-hundred-thousand-row spreadsheets can be processed in the background without exhausting memory or timing out a request, and it can export a Blade view’s rendered HTML table directly to a spreadsheet for custom layouts.

What You Get

• FromCollection/FromQuery/FromView export contracts for turning data or a Blade view into an Excel/CSV file
• Queued and chunked exports so large datasets are generated in the background without memory exhaustion
• ToModel/WithChunkReading/WithBatchInserts import contracts for mapping spreadsheet rows to Eloquent models efficiently
• Multi-sheet workbook support via WithMultipleSheets
• Facade and dependency-injectable API (Excel::download, Excel::import) integrated with Laravel’s service container
• Validation, heading-row, and caching concerns for cleaning and mapping imported data

Common Use Cases

• Letting admin users download a filtered report of database records as an Excel or CSV file
• Bulk-importing a customer- or vendor-supplied spreadsheet into application records with per-row validation
• Queuing a very large export (hundreds of thousands of rows) so it doesn’t block a web request
• Exporting a styled Blade-rendered HTML table directly as a formatted spreadsheet

Under The Hood

Architecture - The package layers Laravel-specific concerns (src/Concerns, src/Imports, src/Facades) over PhpSpreadsheet: export/import classes implement small marker interfaces (FromCollection, ToModel, WithChunkReading, etc.) that the core Excel facade/service inspects via src/Mixins and src/Files to decide how to stream, chunk, or queue the operation, with background processing handled through src/Jobs and progress/events in src/Events. Tech Stack - Plain PHP (99.96% of the codebase) built on phpoffice/phpspreadsheet for the actual spreadsheet reading/writing, illuminate/support for Laravel container/collection integration across Laravel 5.8 through 13.x, psr/simple-cache for caching, and composer/semver for version constraint handling; requires PHP 7 or 8. Code Quality - Tests under tests/ cover concerns, validators, mixins, cache, and helpers using Orchestra Testbench to boot a Laravel app in isolation, alongside predis/predis and laravel/scout dev dependencies for testing cache and search integrations; the project has run since 2013 with 1,600+ commits and 236 contributors. API Design - The class-based, interface-driven API (implement FromCollection or ToModel on a plain PHP class, then call Excel::download()/Excel::import()) keeps export/import logic testable and decoupled from controllers, and the interface names read as self-documenting contracts, though the breadth of optional concerns (queueing, chunking, batching, multi-sheet) means new users need the docs site to discover which combination applies to their use case.