Ray

I use this plugin everyday while doing WordPress dev work. It’s a great tool.

Ray has been a great to use when working on Laravel sites, so I’m glad they’ve made the effort to also support WordPress. It’s definitely worth the money!

I’ve been using Ray for quite a while now and I have to say, it’s one of the most useful dev tools I use! Gone are the days of spewing vardump and print_r to the screen!

Makes debugging a breeze without dumping out information to the screen. So simple to setup that is is just as easy as doing a var_dump and has so many more features.

If you are constantly writing var_dump() or error_log() to debug your code you’ll know it gets painful when debugging larger and more complex code. Using Ray is the simple way to debug without the hassle of reading through Log files or half rendered / broken pages on the browser. A couple of hours of using Ray and you will have recouped the cost in lost time.

I was having trouble debugging an issue in my WP Cron task. It’s quite complex and calls out to an external database in multiple places, so trying to figure out where the issue was started driving me insane. As there was a PHP error in my code (I was trying to call a method on null) my logger wasn’t picking up any issues, nor was it even logging sometimes and no exceptions were being thrown. After installing Ray it worked right away with no setup (other than installing it with Composer). I then managed to find the issue in about 5 minutes because of Ray’s simplicity and speed in giving you the output. The UI is minimal which is perfect as nothing gets in your way while trying to debug and having everything formatted beautifully is a massive win over basic debug logging. I bought a licence right away and would have happily paid 2x the price I did. Amazingly simple yet powerful ??