Laravel Anydoc

Convert Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OpenDocument, RTF, EPUB, CSV, and PDF documents to clean GitHub-Flavored Markdown in Laravel — powered by Firecrawl anydoc, the Rust library that converts office documents to LLM-ready Markdown in single-digit milliseconds.

There is no PHP binding for anydoc, so this package drives its CLI through Symfony Process. The CLI ships as the npm package @firecrawl/anydoc; npx downloads the prebuilt binary on first use and caches it, so there is nothing else to install beyond Node.js.

Requirements

• PHP 8.1+
• Laravel 10, 11, 12 or 13
• Node.js 20+ (with npx on PATH)

Installation

composer require iammuttaqi/laravel-anydoc

Optionally publish the config file:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=anydoc-config

For a permanent install of the CLI (instead of going through npx on every call), run:

php artisan anydoc:install

Usage

use Muttaqi\Anydoc\Facades\Anydoc;
use Muttaqi\Anydoc\Support\Format;

// From a file path:
$markdown = Anydoc::toMarkdown('/path/to/report.docx');

// From an uploaded file:
$markdown = Anydoc::toMarkdown($request->file('document'));

// From bytes, with the format detected from the content:
$markdown = Anydoc::toMarkdownBytes($bytes);

// Or name it, which signature-less formats (CSV) need:
$markdown = Anydoc::toMarkdownBytes($bytes, Format::Csv);

// Format detection:
Anydoc::formatFromPath('report.odt');      // Format::Odt
Anydoc::formatFromExtension('.pptm');      // Format::Pptx
Anydoc::formatFromBytes($bytes);           // Format::Docx, or null

Or via dependency injection:

use Muttaqi\Anydoc\Anydoc;

class DocumentController
{
    public function show(Anydoc $anydoc, string $id)
    {
        return $anydoc->toMarkdown('/path/to/'.$id.'.pptx');
    }
}

Supported formats

The format is detected from the file content, not the extension, so mislabeled files still convert correctly. CSV has no content marker — pass it explicitly (or rely on the file extension).

Artisan commands

# Convert a single document
php artisan anydoc:convert report.docx
php artisan anydoc:convert slides.pptx --output=slides.md
php artisan anydoc:convert data.csv --format=csv --output=data.md

# Install the anydoc CLI globally
php artisan anydoc:install

Errors

A conversion only fails when no meaningful Markdown could come out of the file. Each failure is thrown as a typed exception, mirroring anydoc's own error variants:

use Muttaqi\Anydoc\Exceptions\AnydocException;
use Muttaqi\Anydoc\Exceptions\EncryptedException;
use Muttaqi\Anydoc\Exceptions\UnsupportedException;

try {
    $markdown = Anydoc::toMarkdown($file);
} catch (EncryptedException|UnsupportedException $e) {
    // No document comes out of these — record the file and move on.
    report($e);
}

Configuration

Publish the config and adjust config/anydoc.php:

Windows

Symfony Process resolves npx through the shell-less PATH lookup, which can miss npx.cmd. If that happens, install the CLI and point the package at the full path:

npm install -g @firecrawl/anydoc

ANYDOC_USE_NPX=false
ANYDOC_BINARY=C:\path\to\npx.cmd

Notes

• Embedded images render as their alt text (Markdown cannot embed bytes); the raw bytes stay available on anydoc's document model, which the CLI does not expose.
• Scanned/image-only PDFs need OCR, which anydoc does not do — they fail as UnsupportedException. Firecrawl's hosted Parse API handles those (see firecrawl/firecrawl-sdk).
• Conversions are synchronous and spawn a short-lived process. For batch pipelines, queue the work.

Testing

composer test

Unit tests always run. Integration tests convert real documents and auto-skip when the anydoc CLI is unavailable.

License

MIT