Sebastian De Deyne has a post to his site that shares some hints on how to track down the dreaded "class log does not exist" error in Laravel-based applications.

Every now and then I come across a Class log does not exist exception in Laravel. This particular exception is thrown when something goes wrong really early in the application, before the exception handler is instantiated.

Whenever I come across this issue I'm stumped. Mostly it's related to an invalid configuration issue or an early service provider that throws an exception. I always forget how to debug this, so it's time to document my solution for tracking down the underlying error.

As Laravel hides the real issue behind an error thrown from the logging class, it's difficult to determine where the problem actually lies. The path to solve this and get to the actual error involves a change to the handle method and using the die method to output both the message and stack trace of the issue before Laravel can try to handle it. Obviously this is only really meant for debugging but can be handy when this error is hiding the real reason for the failure.