Announced at Laracon AU 2018, and released shortly therafter, Laravel Telescope is an elegant debugging assistant for the Laravel Framework, improving upon functionality available in Laravel Debugbar.

I won't talk much about Telescope here, but you can learn more from this post on Matt Stauffer's blog.

Whilst its primary purpose is as a debugging tool in development, it is also a powerful asset in debugging your production environment. In order to get Telescope, however, I ran in to some stumbling points in my CI environment in GitLab.

To work around this, I set out to conditionally load Telescope. I stumbled upon this comment from Mohamed Said, which suggested loading the TelescopeServiceProvider in one of your application's service providers, but doing so was not enough.

Telescope leverages package auto-discovery to load its default package provider, but in order to prevent this for certain environments (build, testing), we need to opt-out by including laravel/telescope in the composer.json file's extra.laravel.dont-discover key.

"extra": {
  "laravel": {
	"dont-discover": [
	  "laravel/telescope"
	]
  }
}

The default telescope:install command will also place an entry in config/app.php, which is used for application-specific configuration of Telescope, such as authorising access in non-local environments and enabling dark mode.

In order to fully control which conditions Telescope is loaded under, we must also remove the App\Providers\TelescopeServiceProvider::class entry from the providers array.

Now, in your AppServiceProvider's register method, we can add the following:

if (! $this->app->environment('build', 'testing')) {
  $this->app->register(\Laravel\Telescope\TelescopeServiceProvider::class);
  $this->app->register(TelescopeServiceProvider::class);
}

This ensures that both the default Telescope registration, which would have been handled by package auto-discovery, occurs as well as any application-specific configuration in App\Providers\TelescopeServiceProvider.