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Reza Khademi
Reza Khademi

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Laravel Spy: Easily Log Your Application HTTP requests

#webdev #laravel #php #programming

These days, building a web app without using a third-party API is almost impossible!

One of the major things when making outgoing HTTP requests is to review the requests and responses to see what’s happening between our application and the third-party API.

Tracking and logging outgoing HTTP requests will help us improve observability, detect slow APIs, and monitor what’s wrong and why.

Another important thing is having a timeline of requests and responses, so we can review them and extract useful data that we might have missed during the API implementation.

Laravel Spy is a powerfull Laravel package designed to track and log outgoing HTTP requests made by your Laravel application.

Laravel Spy is useful for debugging, monitoring, and auditing external HTTP requests, providing an easy way to inspect details such as URLs, methods, headers, and responses.

To use this package, we first need to install it. So we run:

composer require farayaz/laravel-spy
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After the installation, we publish the package configuration files:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Farayaz\LaravelSpy\LaravelSpyServiceProvider"
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Laravel Spy vendor publish

Laravel Spy published vendor

Then, run the migrations to prepare the database for storing request logs:

php artisan migrate
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Now, If we go into config/spy.php, the configuration file has these options:

    'table_name' => 'http_logs', // table name for storing http logs

    'enabled' => env('SPY_ENABLED', true), // is laravel spy enabled or not
    'db_connection' => env('SPY_DB_CONNECTION'), // using another db connection for http logs

    'exclude_urls' => explode(',', env('SPY_EXCLUDE_URLS', '')), // add url which don't need to be logged by laravel-spy
    'obfuscates' => explode(',', env('SPY_OBFUSCATES', 'password')), // obfuscates and hide the sensitive data
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Laravel Spy gives us an ability to use a separate database connection via the db_connection in cofing file, so we don't abuse the main database connection too much in high-traffic applications.

Also we should be mindful about setting the obfuscates option inside the config/spy.php to hide sensitive data in our API logs like: password, secret and etc.

To check that everything is working we just need to call a sample API through our application. We can add the below code inside our web.php or api.php in our laravel application:

Route::get("/spy", function () {
    Http::get('https://github.com/farayaz/laravel-spy/');
});
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After calling the sample /spy route, head to the http_logs table to view the logged parameters in database.

Laravel Spy database table structure

Now for each request, We can easily see:

  • The full URL of the request
  • The HTTP method (e.g., GET, POST, PUT)
  • Request Headers
  • Request Body
  • Response Header
  • Response Body
  • Response HTTP Status code

That’s it! Laravel Spy is open-source under the MIT License, and we would be more than grateful for any contributions to this package.

Top comments (2)

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cavo789 profile image
Christophe Avonture •

Did you ever looked at laravel telescope ? Logging is why Telescope exists (and much more). Perhaps he'll also track http calls.

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rezakhademix profile image
Reza Khademi •

I knew about it from day one of it's release. But it appears you didn’t understand the situation quite well.