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Install mPDF with Composer

Written for mPDF 8.2 on PHP 8.1+. Updated 2 November 2026.

mPDF is a PHP library that turns HTML and CSS into PDF files. It is installed with Composer, PHP’s package manager. The old ZIP downloads from the mPDF 5 and 6 days are obsolete and won’t run on current PHP.

Requirements

  • PHP 7.4 or newer is the practical baseline for a new project. mPDF 8.2 still installs on older versions, but those no longer get security fixes.
  • The mbstring and gd extensions are required. gd handles images.
  • zlib is strongly recommended: it compresses embedded fonts and images.
  • bcmath is needed only for some barcode types, and xml for SVG images.

Check what you have with php -m.

Install

From your project folder:

composer require mpdf/mpdf

This adds mPDF and its dependencies to vendor/. The package page on Packagist shows the latest release.

Your first PDF

<?php
require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

$mpdf = new \Mpdf\Mpdf([
    'tempDir' => sys_get_temp_dir() . '/mpdf',
]);
$mpdf->WriteHTML('<h1>Hello from mPDF</h1><p>This paragraph is real, selectable text.</p>');
$mpdf->Output('hello.pdf', \Mpdf\Output\Destination::INLINE);

Open the script in a browser and the PDF appears in the browser’s viewer.

Set a writable temp directory

mPDF caches font data and processed images on disk. By default it writes inside vendor/mpdf/mpdf/tmp, which often isn’t writable on servers, and it’s wiped on every deploy. Point tempDir at a folder the web server can write to, as above, and the “temporary files directory is not writable” error goes away.

Coming from mPDF 5 or 6?

Old code looks like include 'mpdf.php'; $mpdf = new mPDF('utf-8', 'A4');. In mPDF 7 and 8:

  • The class is namespaced: new \Mpdf\Mpdf([...]).
  • It takes one array of settings instead of positional arguments.
  • It is loaded through Composer’s autoloader.

The configuration guide maps the old arguments to the new keys.

Next steps