PHP Library for ESC/POS Printers

A PHP library for generating ESC/POS commands to communicate with thermal receipt printers.

Underneath, it uses mike42/escpos-php to talk to the printer, but that library is an implementation detail: nothing in this package’s public API exposes a Mike42\Escpos\* type or constant. See Architecture for why that matters and how it is enforced.

Features

• Fluent, chainable API for common receipt printing tasks.
• Own vocabulary (enums and constants) for every ESC/POS value, instead of the underlying library’s constants — see Vocabulary.
• 1D and 2D barcode generation, including PDF417 (native command or as a printed bitmap when the printer has no native support) — see Printing Images.
• Sending the generated bytes to a real network printer, without a raw socket or the underlying library’s connectors — see Network Delivery.
• Special character handling and replacement.
• Receipt cutting and cash drawer opening.

Installation

composer require derafu/escpos

Quick Start

use Derafu\Escpos\Enum\Justification;
use Derafu\Escpos\EscposPrinter;

// Initialize the printer. With no options, it buffers ESC/POS bytes in
// memory instead of talking to a real printer — useful for building the
// receipt and deciding what to do with the bytes afterwards.
$printer = new EscposPrinter();

// Print some text.
$printer
    ->println('Hello World!')
    ->setJustification(Justification::Center)
    ->println('Centered Text')
    ->println('Multiple lines')
    ->feed(2); // Add some empty lines.

// Finalize the receipt (adds final line breaks, cuts paper, opens the
// drawer if configured) and get the ESC/POS bytes.
$escposData = $printer->end();

// Do whatever you need with the bytes: return them from an API, save them
// to a file, or send them to a real printer (see Network Delivery).
echo $escposData;

Configuration Options

The EscposPrinter constructor accepts an options array as its first argument:

A second, optional constructor argument lets you replace the default backend — see Architecture.

Full Example

The repository’s examples/full-example.php exercises every feature (text formatting, image, barcode, PDF417, special characters). Run it with:

php examples/full-example.php | nc 172.16.1.5 9100

Note: you need netcat installed, and 172.16.1.5/9100 should be the IP and port of your thermal printer. See Network Delivery for a pure-PHP alternative to nc.