Using Rollbar with Laravel and Laravel Envoyer

When i’m writing small Laravel applications. Whenever an error occured in my application I used to ssh into the error logs and figure out what was the problem. It’s not ideal but my Laravel sites are small personal projects. So I could never justify getting an error logging service.

I came across Rollbar on one of the podcasts I listen to it has loads of features and as a free tier for small appliactions which is perfect for me. I want go through the process of integrating it into a Laravel project and setting it up with Laravel Envoyer.

I’m going to assume you currently have a Rollbar account they have a free tier with no credit card needed for signup and it’s straightforward to do so, I’m also going to assume you have a Laravel application with Envoyer for Deployments. But Envoyer isn’t essential as this is only for deployment monitoring.

1. Rollbar

2. On the Dashboard click on Integrate a Notifier. Now from the list of Languages select PHP. On this page make a copy of the server-side key.

3. Laravel

4. Go to composer.json file for your application and add the following package “jenssegers/rollbar”: “^1.5” under require. This is great package which makes the Rollbar integration straightforward.

5. With the package added now go to the command line for you application do a composer update.

6. Now open up the following file config/app.php. We need to add the rollbar package as an application service provider. In providers array add in the following snippet.

   Jenssegers\Rollbar\RollbarServiceProvider::class,

7. We now need to change how the existing errors are getting logged this is done in the following file app/Exceptions/Handler.php. In this file go to the report function and replace the code with the following below.

   public function report(Exception $e)
       {
           \Log::error($e);
           return parent::report($e);
       }

8. In the config/services.php add in the information for rollbar.

   'rollbar' => [
           'access_token' => env('ROLLBAR_TOKEN'),
           'level' => env('ROLLBAR_LEVEL'),
       ],

9. If you want error logging in development open up the .env file in the root of your application. Copy the following into the file.

   ROLLBAR_TOKEN=PASTE-YOUR-SERVER-SIDE-KEY
   ROLLBAR_LEVEL=debug,

   Rollbar is now recording your errors. Time to integrate it into Envoyer.

10. Envoyer

11. Log into Envoyer and goto to your project. Click on the server tab then click on Manage Environment. Add in the following to your live .env file.

    ROLLBAR_TOKEN=PASTE-YOUR-SERVER-SIDE-KEY
    ROLLBAR_LEVEL=debug,

    Rollbar is now set up on live. The final bit which we need to do is set up the deployment tracking.

12. Click On the Deployment Hooks and select Purge Old Releases options. Add a new hook after this action. Then place in the following code.

       curl https://api.rollbar.com/api/1/deploy/ \
      -F access_token=PASTE-YOUR-SERVER-SIDE-KEY \
      -F environment=production \
      -F revision={{sha}}  \
      -F local_username=`whoami`

You should be set up for error reporting and deployment notification. I recommend spending some time going through the other integration service such as Trello and Slack.