On the Laravel News site there's a tutorial posted showing you how to Install the Zend Z-Ray tool on Homestead, the popular Laravel-related virtual machine environment. This tool helps with debugging applications by giving you an inside look (a sort of "x-ray") into its inner workings as it executes.

For the past week or so I have been running Zend Z-Ray in Laravel Homestead. Every time using it, new features come to light that are fantastic for debugging your apps in development! What follows is a quick preview of Z-Ray, along with all the steps necessary to install it on Laravel Homestead.

He talks some about the Z-Ray tool and the features it has to offer as well as some of the technologies it supports. He also covers some of the Laravel specific features included like project information, route inspection and current user information. He then gets into the Administration panel, what kinds of information it provides and, finally, how to get it all installed and working. It's not a super simple process but all the commands you'll need are included in the post.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a recent tutorial showing you how to use the Scrutinizer service to evaluate the quality and "pain points" in your PHP code, be it a library or full application.

We’ve gone through a decent number of tutorials about code quality, inspections, auto-build systems and so on here at SitePoint. [...] In this article, we’ll take a look at Scrutinizer CI – a continuous integration tool that’s quite expensive and closed to private projects, but very handy for public ones.

He starts with a quick comparison of Scrutinizer versus (and really plus) the popular CI service Travis CI. He then walks you through the setup of Scrutinizer to evaluate your application automatically when code is pushed to GitHub. He then gets into the configuration options the service provides including filters, specific checks to evaluate and other tools to execute in the evaluation build. The article then gets into examples of the reports that are provided and a bit of detail about what each view provides. There's also options to hide certain errors that you know aren't actually problems and the "follow up" links it provides for the issues you may not understand.