A Step-by-Step Guide to Laravel Telescope: Debugging Made Easy

ArjunAmrutiya
2 min readJul 14, 2023

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Laravel Telescope Title

Introduction:
Laravel Telescope is a powerful debugging tool that allows developers to monitor and debug their Laravel applications effortlessly. With Telescope, you can easily inspect incoming requests, database queries, log entries, and much more. In this step-by-step guide, we will explore the installation process and showcase some code examples to help you get started with Laravel Telescope.

Step 1: Installation
To begin, make sure you have a Laravel application up and running. If you don’t, you can create a new Laravel project using the following command:

composer create-project - prefer-dist laravel/laravel myapp

Once you have your Laravel application set up, you can install Telescope via Composer. Run the following command in your terminal:

composer require laravel/telescope - dev

Step 2: Configuration
After the installation is complete, you need to publish Telescope’s configuration and migration files. Use the following commands:

php artisan telescope:install
php artisan migrate

Step 3: Authentication (optional)
By default, Telescope is only accessible in non-production environments. However, you can configure authentication to secure your Telescope dashboard in production as well. Open the `config/telescope.php` file and update the `gate` method with your preferred authentication logic.

Step 4: Start the Server
You are now ready to start the Laravel development server. Run the following command in your terminal:

php artisan serve

Step 5: Accessing the Telescope Dashboard
To access the Telescope dashboard, visit the following URL in your browser:

http://localhost:8000/telescope

Step 6: Exploring Telescope Features
Once you have accessed the Telescope dashboard, you will be greeted with a clean and intuitive interface. Here are a few features that Telescope offers:

a. Requests Tab:
— View and analyze incoming requests.
— Inspect request and response details.
— Track exception occurrences and their stack traces.

b. Database Tab:
— Monitor database queries executed during requests.
— Analyze query performance and execution time.
— Explore the query details and bindings.

c. Logs Tab:
— Review log entries and their respective timestamps.
— Filter logs based on the log level.
— Search for specific log messages.

d. Exceptions Tab:
— Track and inspect unhandled exceptions in your application.
— Analyze the exception message, stack trace, and context.

Step 7: Customizing Telescope
Telescope provides various configuration options to tailor the tool to your needs. You can modify the `config/telescope.php` file to adjust settings such as telescope path, database pruning, and more. Additionally, you can create custom Telescope watchers to monitor specific events or data points in your application.

Conclusion:
Laravel Telescope simplifies the debugging process and provides valuable insights into your Laravel applications. With its user-friendly interface and powerful features, you can quickly identify and resolve issues, improving your application’s performance and reliability.

By following this step-by-step guide, you can easily integrate Laravel Telescope into your projects and streamline your debugging workflow. Happy debugging!

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ArjunAmrutiya

👋 Hey there! I'm Arjun Amrutiya, a passionate web developer and blogger who loves all things PHP, Laravel and Vue.js. Welcome to my Medium account!