Log Cabin for Laravel

Ships logs and health heartbeats from a Laravel application to a central Log Cabin panel.

Once installed, existing Log::error() calls and unhandled exceptions are delivered to your panel with no code changes, delivery is queued so a panel outage never blocks your app, and a self-scheduled heartbeat reports the site's health every few minutes.

Requirements

• PHP 8.2 or higher
• Laravel 11, 12 or 13

Installation

Install the package via Composer:

composer require forestry/logcabin-laravel

Publish the configuration file:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=logcabin-config

Then set the following in your .env:

LOGCABIN_ENDPOINT=https://logcabin.example.com
LOGCABIN_TOKEN=the-token-issued-from-the-Log-Cabin-panel
QUEUE_CONNECTION=database

The token comes from the Log Cabin panel: open the site under Sites, then use the Generate API Token action on the site's edit page. The plaintext token is only shown once, so copy it straight into .env. The token alone identifies the site.

Note: No Laravel Sanctum install is needed on your app. This package is a plain HTTP client that sends an Authorization: Bearer <token> header; Sanctum only lives on the Log Cabin panel to verify that token.

QUEUE_CONNECTION matters: log and heartbeat delivery is queued so a Log Cabin outage never blocks the client app's own requests. If the app already uses a non-sync queue driver (redis, database, etc.) nothing further is needed. If it's on sync, switch it to database (run php artisan queue:table && php artisan migrate if that table doesn't exist yet) and make sure a queue worker is running (see Production setup below).

Configuration

All settings are driven by environment variables, so you rarely need to edit the published config file directly.

Usage

Automatic error capture

By default, the package appends a logcabin log channel to your app's stack channel, so existing Log::error() calls and unhandled exceptions ship automatically with no code changes required. Set LOGCABIN_AUTO_ATTACH=false to disable this if your app doesn't log through stack.

Manual reporting

Report events or exceptions explicitly through the LogCabin facade:

use Forestry\LogCabin\Laravel\Facades\LogCabin;

LogCabin::report('payment.failed', 'Charge declined', ['order_id' => $order->id]);
LogCabin::reportException($exception);

Heartbeats

A logcabin:heartbeat command is registered and self-scheduled (every LOGCABIN_HEARTBEAT_INTERVAL minutes, default 5). No changes to your app's scheduler are required, as long as php artisan schedule:run is already running via cron.

Production setup

Three background processes need to be running on the server for this package to actually deliver anything. It fails silently if they aren't, by design, so that it never takes the app down.

1. Cron entry for the scheduler (drives both the heartbeat and the scheduler-liveness signal):

   * * * * * cd /path/to/your/app && php artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1
   

2. A queue worker processing the queue named in LOGCABIN_QUEUE (default default). This is what actually sends the HTTP requests for logs and heartbeats. Under Supervisor:

   [program:app-queue-worker]
   command=php /path/to/your/app/artisan queue:work --sleep=3 --tries=3 --max-time=3600
   directory=/path/to/your/app
   autostart=true
   autorestart=true
   numprocs=1
   user=www-data
   redirect_stderr=true
   stdout_logfile=/path/to/your/app/storage/logs/queue-worker.log
   

   Reload with supervisorctl reread && supervisorctl update && supervisorctl restart app-queue-worker. If the app already runs a queue worker for its own jobs, this package's jobs ride along on the same worker. No separate process is needed unless you want the LOGCABIN_QUEUE isolated.
3. Outbound HTTPS access from the server to LOGCABIN_ENDPOINT. Check firewall and egress rules if tokens validate locally (php artisan tinker then Http::withToken(...)->post(...)) but nothing shows up in the panel.

Quick end-to-end check after deploying:

php artisan logcabin:heartbeat   # run once manually; should queue a heartbeat job
php artisan queue:work --once    # process it

Then confirm the site shows a recent last_seen_at in the Log Cabin panel. If it doesn't move, check storage/logs/laravel.log on the client site. The package's jobs log delivery failures there after retries are exhausted, via the single channel rather than through logcabin itself, to avoid a retry loop when the app's default log channel includes logcabin.

Testing

composer test

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md for a list of changes.

License

The GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later). See LICENSE for details.