laravel-time-machine maintained by jaydeep
⏱ Laravel Time Machine
Inspect, profile and visualize every stage of your Laravel application's request lifecycle — from bootstrapping to response — with detailed execution timelines and performance insights.
Understand exactly what happens inside every request: how long the framework took to boot, when the route matched, how long the controller ran, every database query on the timeline, and your own custom spans — all rendered as an interactive Gantt-style dashboard.
Features
- 🧭 Full lifecycle timeline — Bootstrap & Boot → Middleware & Routing → Controller & Response → Terminate, each measured to the millisecond.
- 🗄 Query profiling — every SQL statement captured with bindings, connection, offset on the timeline and duration (slow queries highlighted).
- 📌 Custom spans & marks — instrument your own code with a one-line facade.
- 📊 Visual dashboard — a self-contained web UI listing recent requests with a Gantt-style timeline detail view. No asset compilation required.
- 🧠 Performance insights — total time, peak memory, query count/time, slow-request flagging.
- 🪶 Zero-overhead when disabled — off in production by default; nothing recorded, nothing rendered.
Installation
composer require jaydeep/laravel-time-machine
The service provider and TimeMachine facade are auto-discovered. Publish the config if you want to tune it:
php artisan vendor:publish --tag=time-machine-config
Usage
By default Time Machine is active whenever APP_DEBUG=true. Browse your app, then open the dashboard:
http://your-app.test/time-machine
Every non-ignored HTTP request is recorded automatically. Click a request to see its full lifecycle timeline, queries and marks.
Instrument your own code
use Jaydeep\LaravelTimeMachine\Facades\TimeMachine;
// Drop a marker on the timeline
TimeMachine::mark('cache primed');
// Time a block of code as a span
$report = TimeMachine::measure('generate-report', function () {
return Report::build();
});
// Or open/close manually
TimeMachine::startSpan('external-api');
$response = Http::get('https://api.example.com');
TimeMachine::endSpan('external-api');
Configuration
config/time-machine.php (env keys in brackets):
| Key | Default | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
enabled [TIME_MACHINE_ENABLED] |
follows APP_DEBUG |
Master on/off switch |
dashboard.path [TIME_MACHINE_PATH] |
time-machine |
Dashboard URI prefix |
dashboard.middleware |
['web'] |
Guards the dashboard (add auth in production) |
storage.max_records [TIME_MACHINE_MAX_RECORDS] |
100 |
Profiles retained (oldest pruned) |
storage.path |
storage/time-machine |
Where profiles are written |
collectors.queries |
true |
Capture DB queries |
ignore_paths |
assets, telescope… | Paths never profiled (wildcards) |
thresholds.slow_request / slow_query |
500 / 50 ms |
UI highlighting |
Production tip: if you enable it in production, lock the dashboard down with an auth middleware via
dashboard.middleware.
How it works
Time Machine anchors the timeline to LARAVEL_START and records phase boundaries from framework hooks and events:
LARAVEL_START→ boot startApplication::booted()→ providers bootedRouteMatchedevent → routing completeRequestHandledevent → response ready- A prepended global middleware's
terminate()→ request finished, profile persisted
Queries are captured via the QueryExecuted event. Everything is flattened into millisecond offsets and stored as one JSON file per request.
Requirements
- PHP 7.4+ / 8.x
- Laravel 8, 9 or 10
License
MIT © Jaydeep Gadhiya