Laravel Tutorials / updated: July 19, 2016

Installing Zend Z-Ray on Homestead

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.

Overview

Z-Ray installs on the server, and will automatically load on all your projects on that particular server (in our case Homestead) automatically. Even better, it supports many major frameworks right out of the box, including: WordPress, ZendFramework (1 & 2), Magento, Drupal, with Symfony support on the way. (You can even extend it for your own Framework, if you like!)

This is very exciting for developers who have all their client sites in Homestead, regardless of the framework. The bottom line is that Z-Ray saves time and provides debugging tools without requiring you to install them in each project.

General Features of Z-Ray

Laravel Features in Z-Ray

Admin Panel

The admin panel can be easily accessed from the Z-Ray bar itself via the right hamburger menu and selecting “Settings”, or you can browse any of your homestead sites with the admin port 10081, for example http://example.dev:10081/.

Installation

Requirements

• Laravel Homestead 2
• Zend Z-Ray Stand-Alone Installer

Guide

SSH into your homestead environment, and make sure you are in your home folder:

homestead ssh
cd ~

Let’s download Z-Ray:

wget http://downloads.zend.com/zray/1208/zray-php5.6-Ubuntu-14.04-x86_64.tar.gz

Enter super-user mode:

sudo su

Unzip the archive:

tar xvfz zray-php5.6-Ubuntu-14.04-x86_64.tar.gz -C /opt

Create a new file /etc/nginx/conf.d/zray.conf:

server {
  listen 10081 default_server;
  server_name _;
  server_name_in_redirect off;
  root /opt/zray/gui/public;
  index index.php index.html index.htm;
  location ~ ^/ZendServer/(.+)$ {
    try_files /$1 /index.php?$args;
  }
  location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args;
  }
  location ~ \.php$ {
    fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    include fastcgi_params;
  }
}

Create symlinks to PHP configurations:

ln -sf /opt/zray/zray.ini /etc/php5/cli/conf.d/zray.ini 
ln -sf /opt/zray/zray.ini /etc/php5/fpm/conf.d/zray.ini

Verify Z-Ray is running:

php -v

Inside the with sections you should see Z-Ray listed:

with Zend Server Z-Ray v8.5.0

Now, we need to set permissions on the Z-Ray files so the web server can access them:

chown -R vagrant:vagrant /opt/zray

And finally, lets restart NGINX:

service nginx restart

You can now exit out of super-user mode (CTRL-D). Before we leave Homestead, let’s clean up after ourselves:

cd ~
rm -rf zray*

And now exit out of homestead (CTRL-D again). We’re almost there. We just need to edit the Homestead configuration to open the Z-Ray admin port:

homestead edit

And add the following lines under the cpus directive:

ports: 
    - send: 10081 
      to: 10081

Let’s restart and provision Homestead:

homestead halt
homestead up --provision

Now simply access any of your homestead sites like you normally would under port 8000, and you should see the Z-Ray bar at the bottom.

If Z-Ray does not load and you are getting a 500 error in your browser console, it may be necessary to re-apply the permissions to the Z-Ray folder:

homestead ssh
sudo chown -R vagrant:vagrant /opt/zray

When done, hit CTRL-D or type exit to leave homestead, and try loading it in your browser again. This should fix it.

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Uninstallation

To uninstall it, we simply reverse the process:

sudo -i
rm /etc/php5/cli/conf.d/zray.ini 
rm /etc/php5/fpm/conf.d/zray.ini
rm /etc/nginx/conf.d/zray.conf
rm -rf /opt/zray

Now exit out of Homestead and remove the 10081 port from your Homestead.yml file.
After that, halt and restarting Homestead should be the finishing touch.

homestead halt && homestead up

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I want to thank Zeev Suraski from Zend for inviting me to test-drive their tech preview of the stand-alone version of Z-Ray.

We would love to hear about your experiences with Z-Ray! Do you like it? Does it improve your development workflow? Let us know.