X Ray Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Debugging & Observability Roadmap: Accelerates adoption of Laravel Ray (a debugging tool for Laravel) by providing a CLI tool to audit codebases for existing Ray usage, ensuring consistency and reducing manual review time.
• Build vs. Buy: Avoids reinventing a custom solution for scanning Ray usage across repositories, saving engineering time and reducing technical debt.
• Compliance & Best Practices: Enforces standardized debugging practices (e.g., mandating Ray for critical logs) by flagging violations in PRs or CI pipelines.
• Performance Profiling Initiatives: Supports scaling observability efforts by identifying where Ray is underutilized, guiding teams to adopt it for performance-critical paths.
• Legacy Code Modernization: Helps migrate older Laravel apps to modern debugging standards by surfacing outdated logging practices (e.g., Log::debug() without Ray context).

When to Consider This Package

• Adopt if:
  • Your team uses Laravel Ray for debugging and wants to enforce its usage across repositories.
  • You need a lightweight, CLI-based tool to scan PHP/Laravel codebases for Ray calls (vs. manual grep or IDE plugins).
  • Your CI/CD pipeline requires automated audits of debugging practices (e.g., blocking PRs with missing Ray instrumentation).
  • You’re migrating from legacy logging to structured debugging (Ray) and need to validate adoption.
• Look elsewhere if:
  • You’re not using Laravel Ray (this package is Ray-specific).
  • You need real-time monitoring (use Ray’s native tools instead).
  • Your codebase is non-PHP/Laravel (e.g., Node.js, Python).
  • You require deep static analysis (e.g., detecting anti-patterns beyond Ray calls; consider PHPStan or Psalm).

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For Executives: "This tool lets us automate debugging consistency across our Laravel apps by scanning for Ray usage—just like a spellcheck for our code. It’s a 10-minute setup that saves hours of manual reviews, ensuring we’re all using the same observability standards. Think of it as a ‘debugging compliance’ layer for our tech stack."

For Engineering: *"Spatie’s x-ray is a CLI tool to audit Ray calls in our codebase. It’s perfect for:

• Enforcing Ray in PRs (e.g., ‘This method must use Ray for logs’).
• Finding gaps in debugging coverage (e.g., ‘Why isn’t this endpoint instrumented?’).
• Onboarding new devs faster by surfacing Ray best practices. It’s MIT-licensed, lightweight, and integrates with GitHub Actions or any CI tool. Let’s add it to our composer.json and run it in pre-commit hooks."*