Valerio for Inspector.dev

Posted on Apr 14, 2020 • Edited on May 6, 2020 • Originally published at inspector.dev

How to monitor a Bagisto e-commerce in Real-Time using Inspector

#php #laravel #devops

Hi I'm Valerio, software engineer from Italy and CTO at Inspector.

As you probably know Bagisto is a great e-commerce platform based on Laravel framework. It is "developer oriented", so it is very common to implement our extension or use those of other developers by installing external packages.

If you are responsible to keep a bagisto implementation fully operational you probably know that any issue can expose you to competitive or financial risks.

If something goes wrong in your platform, customers will not spend their time to inform you about the problem, they simply close the page, and it may take months before they return.

Thanks to its Laravel foundation Bagisto is a perfect example of how developers can enjoy the ready-to-go Inspector experience, integrating a real-time monitoring system in less than one minute.

Before starting

I will configure Laravel Homestead as development environment so you can eventually reproduce your production environment with no effort.

Using a VM for local development changed my development experience in a positive way so I really invite you to use this setup as well.

In this article I will not dive deep in Homestead installation and configuration, take a look on my Homestead step by step guide to have a complete "how to": https://www.inspector.dev/how-and-why-to-use-laravel-homestead-for-local-development-real-life-tips/

Create a Bagisto project

Bagisto ships as composer project, so the best way to start is creating a new composer project using the command below:

composer create-project bagisto/bagisto

This command will create a "bagisto" folder inside the current terminal's directory.

The first things to do is to complete the configuration in your .env file to be sure that your installation have all information to run smoothly.
Open your .env file and fill the information below:

APP_URL=http://bagisto.locl
DB_DATABASE=homestead
DB_USERNAME=homestead
DB_PASSWORD=secret

APP_TIMEZONE=Europe/Rome
APP_CURRENCY=eur

Database configurations are needed to make your application ready to run in the Homestead VM, so be sure to copy exactly what reported above.

For APP_TIMEZONE and APP_CURRENCY feel free to use what is appropriate in your case.

Install Homestead

Now it's time to install Laravel Homestead to create a dedicated VM to use as isolated development environment.

If it's the first time that you approach with Homestead you need to install VirtualBox and Vagrant in your laptop.

You can download and Install VirtualBox from here: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

You can download and install Vagrant from here: https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html

Generate the Homestead.yaml file

Run the make command based on your OS:

Mac / Linux:

php vendor/bin/homestead make

Windows:

vendor\\bin\\homestead make

This command will generate the Homestead.yaml file in your project directory.

Open the file in your editor and change the url to reach your Bagisto installation in your browser:

sites:
    -
        map: bagisto.locl
        to: /home/vagrant/code/public

That's it.

Run the VM with your application inside

In your project's directory execute:

vagrant up

You will see the booting logs appear in your teminal, it takes just a few seconds, than the console back in your control.

Now the VM is running in your PC and every change you make in your source code will be automatically reported inside the VM, so you can continue to work in your IDE as usual.

Open your browser and past the bagisto installation address:
http://bagisto.locl

Add Real-Time monitoring for your production environment

Now you are able to develop your e-commerce platform and release your code in production.

To monitor how your code performs in production environment we'll install the Inspector package so you will be able to identify any issues before your users are aware of them.

Inspector is a composer package to add real-time monitoring in Laravel applications, it's very easy to install and use, and it takes just two minutes to get started.

Thanks to Inspector you no longer need to spend a lot of time to monitor your application behaviour manually, because an autonomous tool does this job for you 24/7, making it rise to the surface anything that could create problems for users.

Let me show you how it works.

Install Inspector

Point your terminal in your project directory and run the command below:

composer require inspector-apm/inspector-laravel

Configure the API key

Get a fresh API key by signing up for Inspector and creating a new application, it takes just a few seconds.

You'll see installation instructions directly in the app screen:

Put the API key into your environment file:

INSPECTOR_API_KEY=13c37c434XXXXXXXXXXXX

Test everything is working:

Execute our test command to check if your application is well configured:

php artisan inspector:test

Go to https://app.inspector.dev/home to explore your demo data.

Incoming Web Requests monitoring

To activate monitoring when your app is executed due to an incoming http request you can use the WebRequestMonitoring middleware.

It works like any other Laravel middleware you are familiar to so you are free to decide which routes need to be monitored based on your routes configuration or on your personal monitoring preferences.

The most easy way to cover all your application routes is attaching the middleware in the App\Http\Kernel class:

/**
 * The application's route middleware groups.
 *
 * @var  array
 */
protected $middlewareGroups = [
    'web' => [
        ...,
        \Inspector\Laravel\Middleware\WebRequestMonitoring::class,
    ],
    'api' => [
        ...,
        \Inspector\Laravel\Middleware\WebRequestMonitoring::class,
    ]
]

Instantly you will see transactions streams in your project's dashboard:

and for each transaction you can monitor what your application is executing in real-time:

Conclusion

When your application starts to serve real users, any issues can expose you to financial or competitive risks that can be minimized with a real-time monitoring tool.

If something goes wrong, getting a true picture of what's happening in your application can require hours or, based on my experience, even days. Inspector can make a huge difference in terms of efficiency and productivity.

Now it's to you.

How much does it cost to lose hours or days to identify problems?
How much does it cost you to lose customers due to technical problems?

You can register an account for free. It takes less than one minute to make your experience with Inspector and save hours or days in front of an issue!

Thank you so much for reading it, if you want know more about Inspector come on our website https://www.inspector.dev. Don't hesitate to share your thoughts on the comment below or drop in live chat! Let's make it together.