Laravel Telescope is a first-party debugging assistant that provides insight into requests, exceptions, log entries, database queries, queued jobs, mail, notifications, and more. It’s invaluable during API development.

Installing Telescope

Install Telescope via Composer:

sail composer require laravel/telescope --dev

The --dev flag ensures Telescope is only installed in development environments.

Publish the assets and run migrations:

sail artisan telescope:install
sail artisan migrate

Accessing Telescope

Visit http://localhost/telescope in your browser. You’ll see a dashboard with tabs for:

• Requests - All HTTP requests to your application
• Commands - Artisan commands that have been run
• Schedule - Scheduled tasks
• Jobs - Queued jobs
• Exceptions - Exceptions that have been thrown
• Logs - Log entries
• Dumps - dump() output
• Queries - Database queries
• Models - Model events (created, updated, deleted)
• Events - Dispatched events
• Mail - Sent emails
• Notifications - Sent notifications
• Cache - Cache hits and misses
• Redis - Redis commands
• Gates - Authorization checks
• Views - Rendered views

Useful for API Development

When building an API, the most useful tabs are:

Requests

See every request that comes in, including:

• Request headers
• Request payload
• Response status and body
• Duration

This is incredibly helpful for debugging authentication issues with Sanctum.

Queries

View all database queries for each request:

• The raw SQL
• Execution time
• Where it was called from

Great for spotting N+1 query problems.

Exceptions

See full stack traces for any exceptions, even if they’re caught and handled.

Production Considerations

Telescope should only run in local/development environments. It’s automatically disabled in production, but you can configure this in config/telescope.php:

'enabled' => env('TELESCOPE_ENABLED', true),

And in your .env:

TELESCOPE_ENABLED=false

Pruning Old Entries

Telescope can accumulate a lot of data. Add a scheduled command to prune old entries in routes/console.php:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schedule;

Schedule::command('telescope:prune --hours=48')->daily();

This keeps only the last 48 hours of data.

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Next up: A look at the demo application you’ll be building.