Introduction

Ray is a beautiful, lightweight desktop app that helps you debug your app. There's a free demo available that can be unlocked with a license.

Ray supports PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js, Go and Bash applications. After installing one of the libraries to send information to Ray, you can use the ray function to quickly dump stuff. Any variable(s) that you pass to ray will be displayed.

Here's an example for a Laravel app (for other languages the syntax is similar):

ray('Hello world');

ray(['a' => 1, 'b' => 2])->color('red');

ray('multiple', 'arguments', 'are', 'welcome');

ray()->showQueries();

User::firstWhere('email', 'john@example.com');

Here's how that looks like in Ray.

There are many other helper functions available on Ray that allow you to display things that can help you debug such as runtime and memory usage, queries that were executed, and much more.

In addition to debugging locally, you can also connect to a server. All ray calls performed on that server will be securely forwarded via SSH to your local machine.

Next: Installing Ray