# Laravel Excel: How to append rows to an existing Excel file

Hey guys,

Well damn, it has been a while since my last post lol, lazy & busy. But here I am, back to write useful tips for y’all 🥹

Let us do some exporting tasks for today, using Laravel Excel to export XLSX (yeah CSV is so 2010 lol). But, append more rows to an existing file.

## The approach

From your export class (e.g.: `UserExport`), implements the `WithEvents`

Once you added the `registerEvents` method, add this

```php
    public function registerEvents(): array
    {
        return [
            BeforeWriting::class => function (BeforeWriting $event) {
                if (!Storage::exists($this->filePath)) {
                    return;
                }

                file_put_contents(
                    $tempFile = tempnam('/tmp', 'export') . '.xlsx',
                    Storage::get($this->filePath)
                );

                $templateFile = new LocalTemporaryFile($tempFile);

                $event->writer->reopen($templateFile, Excel::XLSX);
                $event->writer->getSheetByIndex(0)
                    ->export($event->getConcernable());

                return $event->writer->getSheetByIndex(0);
            },
        ];
    }
```

It will retrieve the file from your desired storage (local, public, s3, etc), store to `tmp` folder (which is available for both server & serverless environment), and tell Laravel Excel to use that file to write more rows.

Simple right?

And yeah, I know, it’s a shame that reading an existing file is not available in the package.

## After this, what do we get?

### Daisy-chaining jobs to export tons of rows

Yep, each job can write around 500 ~ 1000 rows, then store the file, and dispatch another job to continue until it writes all rows.

Reduce memory-leak or timeout issues, since jobs only handle a small amount of data.

### Interact with S3 with ease

Thanks to `Storage` from Laravel, this can be done super easy.

With the code above, I’ve read the file, and to write, simply:

```php
Excel::store(
    new UserExport(collect($users), $this->filePath),
    $this->filePath
);
```

### Works for both Server & Serverless

Yep, tested on both server & serverless (Lambda), lovely!

## Finally

Thanks for reading and have fun!