Have you ever wanted to gain deeper insights into your Laravel application's performance and behavior? In that case, Laravel Telescope might be something you want to give a shot. In this blogpost, I'll explain what exactly Laravel Telescope is, how to set it up in your Laravel application and why it should be the next tool in your toolbox.
What Exactly Is Laravel Telescope?
In simple terms, it's a debugging tool that logs all requests made in your application, displayed in a very user-friendly dashboard interface. Specifically, it gives you better insight in the following things:
- logs of what requests are made,
- cache hits & misses,
- errors and exceptions,
- database queries,
... and so much more, all in one place. This makes Laravel Telescope an invaluable tool for developers.
Setting Things Up
Implementing Telescope is very straightforward. In your Laravel project, open your terminal and install the package:
After it has finished downloading, you can publish its assets:
Finally, because Laravel Telescope stores our requests in a database, run a migration:
... And we're all set up!
To check out these statistics, make sure your application is running and visit localhost/telescope. Hooray! Now you're almost ready to start debugging your application.
So How Does It Work?
Let's start by making a request to any route. Say we visit localhost/home, well of course we don't see anything yet. However, under the hood, our request is queried to our database. This query consists of the route we visited, the response status, how long the page load took, and the request type (in our case this was a GET request).
Now let's go back to our Telescope dashboard. Then under the tab Requests, we can find the request listed which we just made.
There are, as you likely have already noticed, many more tabs. A short list of what they are and what they are for:
- Commands: lists all commands you've run inside your terminal related to your Laravel application.
- Queries: a log of all database queries made by your application.
- Jobs: A list of (cron)jobs that your application runs, with a nice overview of what runs when.
- Exceptions: Lists all exceptions with detailed information that occurred within your application.
And the list goes on.
Why Should I Even Use This?
Well I mean it's still up to you whether you want to use this, or do everything manually, risking missing out on bugs and other issues inside your application. If that works best for you or your team, then sure, this is not something mandatory.
However, instead of having to figure out yourself if something breaks and why it breaks, Laravel Telescope gives you a clean user interface for this, which makes the developer experience a bit nicer.
What to watch out for
Because Laravel Telescope queries all requests made to your database, it does slow down your application quite a bit. For local development this is not a disaster. However it is heavily discouraged to use this in a production environment.
Wrapping Up
Use Laravel Telescope if you want a clean, graphical user interface for debugging your Laravel application instead of having to figure out issues by yourself, or avoid missing them. It's also useful for optimizing your application and pointing out things that tests would not have noticed.
It only has upsides and barely any downsides, so give it a shot the next time your building something!
Happy coding!
