How do I write to the console from a Laravel Contr

Question

So I have a Laravel controller:

class YeahMyController extends BaseController {
    public function getSomething() {
        Console::info('mymessage'); // <-- what do I put here?
        return 'yeahoutputthistotheresponse';
    }
}

Currently, I'm running the application using artisan (which runs PHP's built-in development web server under the hood):

php artisan serve

I would like to log console messages to the STDOUT pipe for the artisan process.

Answer 1

Aha!

This can be done with the following PHP function:

error_log('Some message here.');

Found the answer here: Print something in PHP built-in web server

Answer 2

It's very simple.

You can call it from anywhere in APP.

$out = new \Symfony\Component\Console\Output\ConsoleOutput();
$out->writeln("Hello from Terminal");

Answer 3

If you want to log to STDOUT you can use any of the ways Laravel provides; for example (from wired00's answer):

Log::info('This is some useful information.');

The STDOUT magic can be done with the following (you are setting the file where info messages go):

Log::useFiles('php://stdout', 'info');

Word of caution: this is strictly for debugging. Do no use anything in production you don't fully understand.

Answer 4

I haven't tried this myself, but a quick dig through the library suggests you can do this:

$output = new Symfony\Component\Console\Output\ConsoleOutput();
$output->writeln("<info>my message</info>");

I couldn't find a shortcut for this, so you would probably want to create a facade to avoid duplication.

Answer 5

In Laravel 6 there is a channel called 'stderr'. See config/logging.php:

'stderr' => [
    'driver' => 'monolog',
    'handler' => StreamHandler::class,
    'formatter' => env('LOG_STDERR_FORMATTER'),
    'with' => [
        'stream' => 'php://stderr',
    ],
],

In your controller:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Log;

Log::channel('stderr')->info('Something happened!');

Answer 6

Bit late to this...I'm surprised that no one mentioned Symfony's VarDumper component that Laravel includes, in part, for its dd() (and lesser-known, dump()) utility functions.

$dumpMe = new App\User([ 'name' => 'Cy Rossignol' ]);

(new Symfony\Component\VarDumper\Dumper\CliDumper())->dump( 
    (new Symfony\Component\VarDumper\Cloner\VarCloner())->cloneVar($dumpMe)
);

There's a bit more code needed, but, in return, we get nice formatted, readable output in the console—especially useful for debugging complex objects or arrays:

App\User {#17
  #attributes: array:1 [
    "name" => "Cy Rossignol"
  ]
  #fillable: array:3 [
    0 => "name"
    1 => "email"
    2 => "password"
  ]
  #guarded: array:1 [
    0 => "*"
  ]
  #primaryKey: "id"
  #casts: []
  #dates: []
  #relations: []
  ... etc ...
}

---

To take this a step further, we can even colorize the output! Add this helper function to the project to save some typing:

function toConsole($var) 
{
    $dumper = new Symfony\Component\VarDumper\Dumper\CliDumper();
    $dumper->setColors(true);

    $dumper->dump((new Symfony\Component\VarDumper\Cloner\VarCloner())->cloneVar($var));
}

If we're running the app behind a full webserver (like Apache or Nginx—not artisan serve), we can modify this function slightly to send the dumper's prettified output to the log (typically storage/logs/laravel.log):

function toLog($var) 
{
    $lines = [ 'Dump:' ];
    $dumper = new Symfony\Component\VarDumper\Dumper\CliDumper();
    $dumper->setColors(true);
    $dumper->setOutput(function ($line) use (&$lines) { 
        $lines[] = $line;
    });

    $dumper->dump((new Symfony\Component\VarDumper\Cloner\VarCloner())->cloneVar($var));

    Log::debug(implode(PHP_EOL, $lines));
}

...and, of course, watch the log using:

$ tail -f storage/logs/laravel.log

PHP's error_log() works fine for quick, one-off inspection of simple values, but the functions shown above take the hard work out of debugging some of Laravel's more complicated classes.