Making the most of your Laravel dumps

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Laravel has a number of convenient methods to help speed up your development. When developing you sometimes need to see what an object or variable contains to make sure the code is doing what you expect. In this post, I will show you what mastering your dumps can do and showcase some fluent APIs that have this wonderful function available.

Just tell me what a dump is!

All puns aside, I am sure most reading this will have used dd or dump at some point, so I will keep this brief , but for those that don't know it is an alternative to using the traditional var_dump or die as a way to output the contents of some variables or objects. Take the below example code:

1$data = ['foo' => 'bar'];
2 
3dump($data);

If running on the command line this will output to your console like the below.

1array:1 [
2  "foo" => "bar"
3]

Query Builder SQL and bindings

When you are building a complex query with Eloquent's fluent API then it could be handy to see what the query looks like as you build it. Now a few years ago to do this I would have the done this to get the query and bindings displayed:

1$query = App\Models\Post::where('author', 'Bob');
2dump($query->toSql(), $query->getBindings());

Which would output the below into your console showing the fully built query and the bindings underneath.

1select * from `posts` where `author` = ?
2 
3array:1 ["Bob"]

Now this got even better in Laravel 5.8 when they added the dump and dd methods to the query Builder class. Now you can just chain the dump method onto the end of your model query, and you will get the same output. The method is chainable too, so you can build your query in stages and dump at each stage if you really needed too.

1App\Models\Post::where('author', 'Bob')
2    ->dump()
3    ->where('type', 'news')
4    ->dump();

Collections

Once you are happy with your query then you can finally get your results, but wait... oh no they are not what you were expecting. Fortunately, Laravel is here to save the day yet again with yet another fluent dump 👀. If you call the dump function on an Eloquent Collection you will see it output any array of models:

1App\Models\Post::where('author', 'Bob')->get()->dump();
 1array:2 [
 2  0 =>  App\Models\Post {#1745
 3      #attributes: array:7 [
 4          "id" => 1
 5          "title" => "Poop is a crap palindrome..."
 6          "author" => "Bob"
 7          # ...
 8      ]
 9  },
10  1 =>  App\Models\Post { }
11]

Additionally, you can also dump out your collections created from normal arrays after you have finished manipulating them. See the example below:

1collect([
2    ['color' => 'red'],
3    ['color' => 'green'],
4    ['color' => 'blue'],
5])->pluck('color')->dump();
1array:3 ["red", "green", "blue"]

Rendered dumps on requests

When you call any of the above dump methods in a Controller method or Route closure Laravel will render the output for you. If the dump content is a multidimensional array or Collection then it will provide an expandable rendered output which makes navigating large values easier.

1Route::get('dump', function () {
2    App\Models\Post::limit(20)->dump();
3});
1array:20 [â–¼
2  0 => App\Models\Post {#3380 â–¶}
3  1 => App\Models\Post {#3381 â–¶}
4  ...
5]

Wrapping up

These are the current dumps available to you when using Laravel every day. There are plenty of tools and packages out there specifically created to help you in debugging your developments (see below) but sometimes it can be simple enough to just quickly call the dump function to get inline output.

Thank you very much for reading this far, come find me on Twitter if you want to let me know if I missed something or to talk anything Laravel or software development with me.


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