Forensics for CodeIgniter

Forensics is a high-powered, completely customizable replacement for the CodeIgniter Profiler.

What's New?

Forensics adds a few things to the stock Profiler that should make your life as a developer a bit easier. At least when it comes to debugging.

• The Profiler output is now completely skinnable. If you've read the comments in the Profiler class before, this is something that the EllisLab devs have said for a while it would be nice to do. Congrats. It's done.
• The output now also includes a list of all files that your CodeIgniter app includes, as well as their location (relative to your FCPATH).
• Output also has the ability to log items and track memory in your project via a new console class.
• Any variables sent to the view are shown in the bar.
• Forensics now provides a detailed look at queries run via Illuminate Database.

The default look, and some of the additional functionality, was heavily inspired by ParticleTree's PHP Quick Profiler.

Installing

Forensics is intended to be used as a Spark. However, it is best installed using Composer.

Create a composer.json file in your application's root (alongside the application and spark folders). Add the following text in the new file:

{
    "require": {
        "lonnieezell/codeigniter-forensics": "dev-master"
    }
}

Thanks to the magic of compwright/composer-installers the files are transferred to your application's third_party folder. In your application, you will first need to load the newly installed package. This is done easily through the autoloader, but could also be done in your controller with an environment check for maximum optimization.

$autoload['packages'] = array(APPPATH.'third_party/codeigniter-forensics');

Then, just enable the profiler like normal.

$this->output->enable_profiler(true);

Forensics Logging

In addition to the normal information that CI's Profiler provides, you now have two new logging commands at your disposal that work with the Forensics Profiler:

Console::log($data)

This function accepts any data type and simply creates a pretty, readable output of the variable, using print_r(). Very handy for logging where you are in the script execution, or outputting the contents of an array, or stdObject to your new 'console'.

Console::log_memory($variable, $name)

The log_memory function has two uses.

1. When no parameters are passed in, it will record the current memory usage of your script. This is perfect for watching a loop and checking for memory leaks.

2. If you pass in the $variable and $name parameters, will output the amount of memory that variable is using to the console.

In order to use either of these functions, you must be sure to load the Console library before you use it.

Illuminate Database Queries

In addition to CodeIgniter database queries, Forensics can display information about any queries run by Illuminate Database models or the Eloqeunt query builder. This feature is disabled by default. To enable this feature, change the config setting for eloquent in config/profiler.php. If you're using Illuminate Database in your project, note that this feature requires Capsule\Manager.

Other Tips

You can change the location of the profiler bar by changing the $bar_location variable at the top of the profiler_template view to one of the following locations:

• top-right
• top-left
• bottom-left
• bottom-right
• top
• bottom