NEW Package Laravel Brain: Visualize your Codebase to Understand It Better

Hello guys, in this video I want to show you a new package called Laravel Brain by Abdel Rahman which is taking the world of Laravel by storm. So this is a tweet with 400 likes and repository with 300 GitHub stars already and this package generates something like this. So this is kind of an official video by the author and in this video I will try it out myself. So the main purpose of that package as I understand it is to understand your project or understand a new project that you started working on. For example, you're assigned a project or you joining a team or you want to fix something in open-source project which is exactly what I will try. So recently I saw this on Reddit open source project spectacular and I do hunt for such open-source projects for various tips and analysis and reviews and I try to clone it. So this is the GitHub repository but let's imagine I want to quickly understand the codebase. So let's try to use Laravel brain for exactly that. According to the installation, this is my totally fresh spectacular cloned project composer require. And then we launch a command with intriguing name brain scan. So let's copy and I will paste it into a cleaned terminal. And what does it do? Oh, it was very quick because probably the project is pretty small. So we have the viewer at laravel-brain. And what does it show? Okay, we have some dashboard or well the result of our brain scan. And what do we have here? console commands of that project account password and I can click on various nodes and then read the details about that specific method for example routes web what do we have here invitations and then one invitation one route that goes to the controller which I can also click and see what's inside or I can zoom in or or zoom out and then I can click the method and in the method I see lines complexity statements and parameters method flow is even shown. So let's see what's inside. Well, that thing I can see in the code myself. So not that useful. So I guess the project itself is too small and too simple to use the power of Laravel brain. Let's try on another project. So I had this project to sell books. The catalog is empty but with filament admin panel and I installed Laravel brain on that and let's relaunch brain scan which has some more things and let's see what the brain says about this project console commands inspire so this is by default Laravel and route swab we have get again controller method and query source code is also here but again a lot of those things I can look in the code and this for example route is a bit more interesting. So controller method but then private method as I understand and this is for example even more interesting. So check out controller then store method then a few queries and then calling the service. So this is probably really useful like a diagram to understand what is happening inside of the main store method. So we have service which has private methods of checking something and then has the order query or stripe client construct. Also you can customize how that thing can look. So in the view you can change to bread first or circle it's kind of worse grid maybe. No the original one hierarchical was the best but also you can change between vertical and horizontal. In some cases, it may make sense to have horizontal and then fit to screen probably returns to the original position. Also, the package readme says that it has more feed like for example filament PHP support. I do have filament in this project, but for some reason it wasn't shown. Maybe I have to enable it somewhere than stuff like middleware mapping. I didn't have middleares here in my examples from what I understand. You can export any graph to Mermaid or PNG. Actually, let's try that one. Export PNG. And what does it show? Okay, we have a PNG. Great. Also, interesting things like route stress test. I haven't seen and haven't notice where is that button on the dashboard. Maybe I have to activate that. AI content export is some information for context for your AI agent. Let's actually try that as well. Generate AI rules. Also it would generate cloud MD and other agents MD for various AI agents also actually that was AI rules generation and AI context export is something different found it on the dashboard. So for controller there's an icon really small icon copy AI context to clipboard and if I copy that could not copy. Oh because I'm not secure it probably works with HTTPS only. So kind of a side tip, let's run her secure and then it should go through HTTPS. If I refresh that, it should be secure now. And that thing should work. So book controller. Yep, now it is copied. And if I paste it somewhere into Visual Studio, what is the result of that context for that controller? Maybe it's worth pasting. I'm not sure. Probably Laravel Boost has that context already for your project anyway. So yeah, you can explore other features of Laravel brain and try it out yourself. And also the author is pretty active on Twitter. So after the initial launch, he was active launching new feature and actively replying to comments. So yeah, he's really active and probably will spend more time improving the project on this core that is already implemented. Would you use Laravel brain or do you have some alternatives similar to that? Let's discuss as usual in the comments below. That's it for this time and see you guys in other