Ray is a desktop app for macOS and Windows that displays debugging information in a dedicated window. When I reviewed Ray, I was blown away by the ability to pause execution to inspect data sent to Ray—the ability to examine the state of database records in the middle of a request is incredible!

Ray is going to be a fantastic companion to your PHP workflow. You might even find that it’s easier to get started with than XDebug or other alternative methods you’ve used for code debugging.

Some of its main features at launch include:

A framework-agnostic PHP package and Laravel package to start logging from your apps to the Ray desktop app
Define colors of logs to filter by various colors that relate to debugging code
Measure performance and see the output in Ray
Ability to pause code to inspect data, API calls, etc. before proceeding
Display desktop notifications from Ray PHP debugging code
See the caller and entire call stack from a certain point in the code
Laravel-specific helpers that aid debugging in Laravel apps:
Clean model debug output with attribute values
Send database queries to Ray
Ray receives calls to the Laravel logger automatically
Displays mailables automatically
Manual control over sending mailables
Use Ray to debug data in blade views
Show events fired during execution