Today I tried out Laravel Telescope. From the official Laravel Telescope page, it is designed to:

Telescope provides insight into the requests coming into your application, exceptions, log entries, database queries, queued jobs, mail, notifications, cache operations, scheduled tasks, variable dumps, and more.

https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/telescope

Installation

I was adding Telescope to in-progress app that I was developing in VSCode on Github.

These are the commands I followed to add to this existing project:

Firstly, I brought my local development Docker environment up, using Laravel Sail:

./vendor/bin/sail up -d

I followed the Local Only Installation instructions, so I added the Telescope dependency, for the dev environment, using Composer within Sail:

./vendor/bin/sail composer require laravel/telescope --dev

After installing Telescope, I published its assets using the telescope:install Artisan command. After installing Telescope, I also run the migrate command in order to create the tables needed to store Telescope’s data:

./vendor/bin/sail artisan telescope:install
./vendor/bin/sail artisan migrate

After running telescope:install, you need to remove the TelescopeServiceProvider service provider registration from your application’s config/app.php configuration file. Instead, manually register Telescope’s service providers in the register method of your App\Providers\AppServiceProvider class. We will ensure the current environment is local before registering the providers:

public function register()
    {
        //
        if ($this->app->environment('local')) {
            $this->app->register(\Laravel\Telescope\TelescopeServiceProvider::class);
            $this->app->register(TelescopeServiceProvider::class);
        }
    }

Finally, you need to also prevent the Telescope package from being auto-discovered by adding the following to your composer.json file:

"extra": {
    "laravel": {
        "dont-discover": [
            "laravel/telescope"
        ]
    }
},

Configuration

After publishing Telescope’s assets, its primary configuration file will be located at config/telescope.php. This configuration file allows you to configure your watcher options. Each configuration option includes a description of its purpose, so be sure to thoroughly explore this file – all very well documented.

Accessing the Telescope UI

The Telescope dashboard may be accessed at the /telescope route. By default, you will only be able to access this dashboard in the local environment.

http://localhost/telescope

I’ve not had chance to fully explore Telescope yet, but at least the installation was very straight forward. I’m hoping it will be a very useful framework-level debug tool.