Since Tinkerwell 2.2, it is possible to interactivly debug your Laravel apps. You can think of it as a dd helper with super powers. It allows you to instantly open up Tinkerwell and make your variables available in Tinkerwell.
Here's a quick video of how that looks like:
To make use of this in your own Laravel application, you first need to install a little package:
composer require --dev beyondcode/tinkerwell-helper
Once the package is installed, you have access to a global helper method called tinker.
A simple example would be:
$user = User::first();
tinker($user);
This will open up Tinkerwell and you will have immediate access to the $user variable.
But you do not need to have a temporary variable, if you just want to inspect something. You can also do:
tinker(User::first());
This is also going to open up Tinkerwell, but as you seen we have not given the data a specific variable name.
To access this variable in Tinkerwell, you can use the $temp0 variable name.
You can also pass multiple things to the tinkerwell helper:
tinker($user, "a string", "something else");
This will make three variables available in Tinkerwell, named $temp0, temp1 and $temp2.
The tinker helper method really helped me boost my development workflow. It is also extremely handy when you want to debug some data that happens inside a queued job. Just put the tinker method in there and inspect the data using Tinkerwell.
Please note, that this feature currently only works on MacOS.