Glitch

Better tools for when things go wrong

Glitch is a standalone PHP package designed to dramatically improve error handling and inspection when developing your applications.

The project aims to provide deep data inspection tools and an Exception handling interface.

Get news and updates on the DecodeLabs blog.

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Installation

Glitch should be installed via composer

composer require decodelabs/glitch

Usage

Glitch uses Veneer with its frontage registered at DecodeLabs\Glitch. You can access all of the primary functionality through this frontage:

use DecodeLabs\Glitch;

Glitch::getRunMode();
Glitch::dump('hello');

Setup

Otherwise, Glitch works out of the box without any special setup. There are however some optional steps you can take to customise operation.

Register as the default error handler:

use DecodeLabs\Glitch;

Glitch::registerAsErrorHandler();

Register base path aliases for easier reading of file names in dumps:

use DecodeLabs\Glitch;

Glitch::registerPathAlias('app', '/path/to/my/app');

/*
/path/to/my/app/models/MyModel.php

becomes

app://models/MyModel.php
*/

Pass the microtime() of initial app launch for timing purposes:

use DecodeLabs\Glitch;

Glitch::setStartTime(microtime(true));

Set run mode (development | testing | production) so Glitch can format output correctly:

use DecodeLabs\Glitch;

Glitch::setRunMode('development');

Dumps

Dump anything and everything easily, using simple global functions. The functions mirror those used in Symfony/VarDumper, maintaining compatibility by using Symfony's VarDumper interface if it is already loaded.

use DecodeLabs\Glitch;

class MyThing {}
$myObject = new MyThing();

// This will dump the object and carry on
dump($myObject);

// This will dump the object and exit
dd($myObject);

You can also mark functions as incomplete whilst in development:

use DecodeLabs\Glitch;

function myFunction() {
    // This will throw a Glitch exception
    Glitch::incomplete([
        'info' => 'some test info'
    ]);
}

Renderers

The resulting dump UI (when using the HTML renderer, the default option) is injected into an iframe at runtime so can be rendered into any HTML page without breaking anything. If the page is otherwise empty, the iframe will expand to fill the viewport if possible.

The dump output is rendered by an instance of DecodeLabs\Glitch\Renderer which can be overridden on the default Context at startup. The Html renderer is loaded under http sapi, the Cli renderer is used when under the CLI sapi.

Custom renderers may convert Entities to other output formats depending on where they should be sent, such as Xml or Json for example.

Custom colours

The HTML renderer uses css variables to style individual element colours and can be overridden with custom values. Create a custom css file with variable overrides:

:root {
    --string: purple;
    --binary: green;
}

See colours.scss for all of the current colour override options.

Then load the file into the HTML renderer:

use DecodeLabs\Glitch;

Glitch::getRenderer()->setCustomCssFile('path/to/my/file.css');

Transports

Once rendered, the dump information is delivered via an instance of DecodeLabs\Glitch\Transport, also overridable on the default Context. It is the responsibility of the Transport to deliver the rendered dump.

By default, the render is just echoed out to STDOUT, however custom transports may send information to other interfaces, browser extensions, logging systems, etc.

Custom dumps

You can customise how your own class instances are dumped by implementing DecodeLabs\Glitch\Dumpable and / or providing a glitchDump method. The method should either yield or return a list of key / value pairs that populate the requisite fields of the dumper entity.

use DecodeLabs\Glitch;

use DecodeLabs\Glitch\Dumpable;

class MyClass implements Dumpable {

    public $myValue = 'Some text';

    private $otherObject;

    protected $arrayValues = [
        'row1' => [1, 2, 3]
    ];

    public function glitchDump(): iterable {
        yield 'text' => $this->myValue;

        // !private, *protected
        yield 'property:!otherObject' => $this->otherObject;

        yield 'values' => $this->arrayValues;
    }
}

The Dumpable interface is NOT required - Glitch will check for the existence of the method regardless, which is useful if you do not want to rely on a dependency on the Glitch library just to provide better dump handling.

However, the Dumpable interface is provided by glitch-support package which contains only the bear essentials for libraries to provide support to Glitch without including the entire library as a dependency.

Licensing

Glitch is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for the full license text.