README

laravel-snip

A dd() that does not die.

Drop a snip($order) anywhere in your Laravel app and the value shows up in an admin-only on-page panel — no log files to grep, no debugger to attach, no broken page. Works the same on full HTML responses, Livewire components, and Inertia SPA navigations.

snip($order, 'before-payment');

Open the page as an authorised user, hit Cmd+K (or Ctrl+K), and you have a Horizon-style panel pinned to the corner of the page with everything you captured during the request — values, timings, milestones, dataLayer events, cache keys, and queue state.

Safe to leave in production. Gated, redacted, never cached.

Why not just dd() or Debugbar?

vs. dd() / dump()

vs. Laravel Debugbar / Telescope / Clockwork

The trade is deliberate. Debugbar / Telescope answer "what happened in this request?". snip() answers "what is this value right now?" — the same question dd() answers, with none of the costs of dd().

What it carries over from a production-safe tool like Horizon: scoped per-request state, an admin-only gate, private cache headers on every injected response, and zero impact on users who do not match the gate.

Installation

composer require rudolfbruder/laravel-snip
php artisan snip:install

The installer publishes config/snip.php, copies the frontend bundle to public/vendor/snip/, and creates app/Providers/SnipServiceProvider.php where you define who can see the panel.

Register the provider:

// Laravel 10 — config/app.php
App\Providers\SnipServiceProvider::class,

// Laravel 11+ — bootstrap/providers.php
App\Providers\SnipServiceProvider::class,

After every composer update rudolfbruder/laravel-snip, refresh the bundle:

php artisan snip:publish

Who can see the panel

Edit app/Providers/SnipServiceProvider.php:

protected function gate(): void
{
    Gate::define('viewSnip', function ($user = null) {
        return $user?->is_admin === true;
    });
}

Without an override, only app()->environment('local') sees the panel. Unauthorised users never receive captured data — the middleware never injects, the Inertia share callback returns null, and the recording API short-circuits before any backtrace or serialisation runs.

Laravel support

Three top-level helpers cover most use:

snip($value, 'label');     // capture a value
snip_time('elastic');      // record an elapsed-time entry
snip_here('reached-step-2'); // drop a milestone breadcrumb

Or use the facade:

use RudolfBruder\LaravelSnip\Facades\Snip;

Snip::add($order, 'order');
Snip::start('payment');
$result = $gateway->charge($order);
Snip::timing('payment');
Snip::milestone('payment-confirmed');

Reload the page. The panel pill appears bottom-right; click it or press Cmd+K / Ctrl+K.

That is the entire surface area. No bootstrapping, no middleware to register, no <script> tags to add — the package wires everything into the framework on install.

Inertia support

Works out of the box. The package detects Inertia and registers a shared _snip prop so every visit — initial HTML and subsequent SPA XHR navigations — carries the current request's captures.

// Inertia controller
public function show(Order $order)
{
    snip($order, 'order');
    snip_time('elastic-query');

    return Inertia::render('Orders/Show', [...]);
}

Captures appear in the panel without a full page reload. When the panel is already open and you navigate to another page via <Link>, the panel re-renders with the new request's data.

For Inertia POST → 303 → GET XHR flows (form submissions, destroy actions), captures recorded in the POST handler are flashed to the session and replayed on the next request, so nothing gets lost across the redirect.

Tabs

The panel has six tabs. Each tab is independent — you only see the ones with data, or all of them when display_mode = always.

Snips

Inspect any PHP value as a typed, collapsible tree.

snip($order, 'order');
snip(['user' => $user, 'cart' => $cart], 'checkout-state');
snip(Order::with('items')->find($id));

Returns the value unchanged so it can be inlined inside expressions:

return snip(User::find($id), 'lookup')->email;

Eloquent models, collections, arrays, objects, and primitives all render with type badges, child counts, and a memory size estimate. Keys matching password, token, secret, etc. are auto-redacted.

Timings

Profile blocks of code with start/stop marks.

Snip::start('elasticsearch');
$products = $repo->search($query);
Snip::timing('elasticsearch');

snip_time('build-payload');         // measured from request start

Each timing shows the elapsed duration in milliseconds plus where in the request lifecycle it ran, so you can see at a glance which block ate the budget.

Milestones

Confirm a code path executed without breaking the page.

snip_here('discount-applied');
snip_here('admin-fallback-path');

A non-fatal alternative to dd(). Useful for confirming a feature flag fired, a guard clause passed, or a fallback branch took over — anywhere you would have reached for dump() and a page reload.

DataLayer

Tees every window.dataLayer.push(...) call into a panel tab so GTM events are visible without opening the GTM debugger.

window.dataLayer.push({
    event: 'add_to_cart',
    ecommerce: { items: [...] },
});

The tab shows the event name, the full payload, and the order in which events were pushed during the page lifetime. Site-defined events are highlighted; framework noise (gtm.js, gtm.dom, gtm.load) is collapsed.

Disable with SNIP_DATALAYER=false.

Cache

Browse the active cache store without a separate tool.

Supported drivers:

Click any key to fetch its value on demand — the panel never embeds cache contents in the HTML response. Useful for confirming a Cache::remember(...) actually wrote, or seeing what is currently under user:123:cart.

Disable with SNIP_CACHE=false.

Queue

Inspect jobs across the configured queue driver — failed, pending, scheduled, and (Horizon only) completed.

Useful for verifying a job dispatch actually landed, checking why a notification has not gone out yet, or watching a queue drain during a deploy. Each list is paginated and capped (max_scan / per_page) so a 100k-job queue does not stall the request.

Disable with SNIP_QUEUE=false. Name your redis queues with SNIP_QUEUE_NAMES=high,default,low.

Configuration

Publish only when overriding defaults:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=snip-config

Most-used knobs:

See config/snip.php for the full reference with inline notes.

Security

• Captures only reach users who pass the viewSnip gate.
• Common credential keys auto-redacted; extend redact_keys for project-specific PII.
• Injected responses are forced Cache-Control: private, no-store plus Vary: Cookie so shared caches (Varnish, CDN, response cache) cannot leak captures to other users.
• Bundle file contains the renderer only — no captured data lives in JS.
• The recording manager is scoped per request, so Octane and queue workers reset between requests.
• The cache and queue lookup endpoints are gated by the same viewSnip ability — a guest hits 403, not the data.

License

MIT.