What is LaraMint\LaravelBrain?

LaraMint\LaravelBrain is a premium developer tool that analyzes your Laravel codebase and renders an interactive node graph of your application's architecture. It traces every route through its controller, services, repositories, models, jobs, and events — giving you a bird's-eye view of the entire request lifecycle without reading a single line of code.

Features

• Full lifecycle tracing — Follows every route from HTTP verb → controller → service → repository → model → events/jobs
• Premium Interactive Graph — Redesigned with a dark aesthetic, accent-colored nodes, and subtle interactive edges
• Per-route tabs — Each route gets its own isolated subgraph tab
• Middleware mapping — Shows which middleware guards each route
• Model relationships — Displays hasMany, belongsTo, and other Eloquent relations
• N+1 detection — Flags potential N+1 query patterns in method flowcharts
• Method flowcharts — See internal flow as a step-by-step diagram, now with a large modal popup view
• Source viewer — Read the actual source file inline or in a focused large popup
• Export — Export any graph as PNG or Mermaid diagram
• Multiple layouts — Hierarchical, force-directed, breadth-first, circle, grid
• Dot-grid depth — Modern UI with depth and clarity

Requirements

• PHP 8.1+
• Laravel 10, 11, or 12
• Composer

Installation

Install as a dev dependency (it's a development tool, not needed in production):

composer require --dev laramint/laravel-brain

Laravel will auto-discover the service provider. No manual registration needed.

Usage

Scan your project

php artisan brain:scan

This analyzes your entire codebase and writes the graph data to storage/app/laravel-brain/. When complete it prints the URL to open:

  LaraMint\LaravelBrain — analyzing project...
  Path: /your/project

  Scanning routes, controllers, models and call chains...

  Done! Open the viewer at: http://localhost:8000/_laravel-brain

Open the viewer

Navigate to /_laravel-brain in your browser while your Laravel app is running (e.g. via php artisan serve).

The viewer is served entirely through your existing Laravel routes — no separate server process needed.

How It Works

php artisan brain:scan
        │
        ├─ RouteAnalyzer      → scans all files in routes/**/*.php
        ├─ MiddlewareAnalyzer → reads Kernel.php or bootstrap/app.php
        ├─ ControllerAnalyzer → resolves controller classes + methods
        ├─ MethodTracer       → deep-traces call chains (services, repos, models)
        ├─ ModelAnalyzer      → extracts Eloquent relationships
        └─ GraphBuilder       → assembles nodes + edges
                │
                └─ Writes JSON → storage/app/laravel-brain/

GET /_laravel-brain
        │
        └─ BrainController → serves the React SPA + graph JSON via Laravel routes

Route discovery

LaravelBrain recursively scans your entire routes/ directory — not just web.php and api.php. Any PHP file under routes/** is analyzed, including versioned files like routes/v1/users.php or module-specific files like routes/modules/admin.php.

Call chain tracing

From each controller action, the tracer follows:

• Direct method calls to injected services/repositories
• Static calls (MyService::method())
• Job dispatches (dispatch(new SendEmail(...)))
• Event dispatches (event(new OrderPlaced(...)))

This produces the full edge list used to build the graph.

Graph Node Types

Viewer Shortcuts

Routes Registered

The package registers the following routes in your application (all under the /_laravel-brain prefix):

GET /_laravel-brain          → Interactive graph viewer (SPA)
GET /_laravel-brain/api/source   → Returns PHP source file content
GET /_laravel-brain/assets/*     → Serves frontend static assets
GET /_laravel-brain/.graph-*.json → Serves graph data written by the scan

Output Files

After running brain:scan, the following files are written to storage/app/laravel-brain/:

.graph-manifest.json   — Tab manifest (list of all route tabs)
.graph-all.json        — Full combined graph (all routes)
.graph-{tab-id}.json   — Per-route subgraph (one per route)

These files are regenerated on every scan and are safe to gitignore:

storage/app/laravel-brain/

Security

The /_laravel-brain routes are only registered in local environment by default. Since it's a require-dev dependency, it will not be present in production builds (composer install --no-dev).

If you do install it in a non-production environment accessible over a network, consider protecting the routes with middleware.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you'd like to change.

git clone https://github.com/LaraMint/laravel-brain
cd laravel-brain
composer install
cd frontend && npm install && npm run dev

Tests:

composer test

License

MIT — see LICENSE for details.