Laravel 7/8 Send Error Exceptions on Email

Laravel is a powerful and one of the best MVC PHP framework, designed for developers who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications.  It facilitates developers by saving huge time and helps reduce thinking and planning to develop the entire website from scratch.

Whenever we are planning to deploy Laravel application on production server, we test aggressively and try to find out bugs that may create nightmare for clients as well as for developers. Once we are done with testing we turn debug/error logs off for display as actual users are never shown the behind process.

Everything was working fine after we deployed app on production server till customer founds a problem while accessing app due to bug and he/she immediately leaves the application. This can happen to multiple customers until app developers found the same bug and resolves it. This can be very bitter experience for customers and the client will be also be not happy with the service provided.

Now just think that if you were notified immediately through e-mail  about the bug the very first time any customer faced and you fix it ASAP. Laravel provides this feature to send email whenever error occurs on application so that website downtime is much less and minimum customer faces the issue. Let's see how to do that in Laravel.

In Laravel application , all exceptions are handled by the App\Exceptions\Handler class which is by default present in your project directory. This class contains two methods: report and render.  We will only use report method as it is used to log exceptions and send then to email or any other service. By default, the report method simply passes the exception to the base class where the exception is logged. We will modify this method to send error logs to developer or any other email.

Now I am going to show you how you can send error exception mail in your laravel app. Just follow the below steps and you are ON for receiving error logs on e-mail.

1. Create Mail Class using make:mail command

The below command will create a class ExceptionOccured in the app/Maildirectory.

php artisan make:mail ExceptionOccured

After mail class is created, change the code as given below. This will return the error returned to a view file which we will create in next step.

namespace App\Mail;

use Illuminate\Bus\Queueable; 
use Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue;
use Illuminate\Mail\Mailable;
use Illuminate\Queue\SerializesModels;

class ExceptionOccured extends Mailable 
{
    use Queueable, SerializesModels;

    public $content;


    /**
     * Create a new message instance.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->content = $content;
    }

    /**
     * Build the message.
     *
     * @return $this
     */
    public function build()
    {
         return $this->view('emails.exception')
                    ->with('content', $this->content);
    }
}

2. Create Email View File

Now Let's create a new view file inside the resouces/views/emails folder with name exception.blade.php. and the below-given code in newly created file. We will just echo the variable passed from Mail class we created in previous step.

{!! $content !!}

3. Send Error Exception Mail from Handler file

Let's Go to App\Exceptions\Handler file and update the below code into your file.

namespace App\Exceptions;

use Illuminate\Foundation\Exceptions\Handler as ExceptionHandler;
use Log;
use Throwable;
use Symfony\Component\ErrorHandler\ErrorRenderer\HtmlErrorRenderer;
use Symfony\Component\ErrorHandler\Exception\FlattenException;

class Handler extends ExceptionHandler
{
    /**
     * A list of the exception types that are not reported.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    protected $dontReport = [
        //
    ];

    /**
     * A list of the inputs that are never flashed for validation exceptions.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    protected $dontFlash = [
        'password',
        'password_confirmation',
    ];

    /**
     * Report or log an exception.
     *
     * @param  \Throwable  $exception
     * @return void
     *
     * @throws \Exception
     */
    public function report(Throwable $exception)
    {
             // emails.exception is the template of your email
             // it will have access to the $error that we are passing below

        if ($this->shouldReport($exception)) {
             $this->sendEmail($exception); // sends an email
        }

         return parent::report($exception);

    }

    /**
     * Render an exception into an HTTP response.
     *
     * @param  \Illuminate\Http\Request  $request
     * @param  \Throwable  $exception
     * @return \Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response
     *
     * @throws \Throwable
     */
    public function render($request, Throwable $exception)
    {
        return parent::render($request, $exception);
    }

    public function sendEmail(Throwable $exception)
    {
       try {
            $e = FlattenException::create($exception);
            $handler = new HtmlErrorRenderer(true); // boolean, true raises debug flag...
            $css = $handler->getStylesheet();
            $content = $handler->getBody($e);

            \Mail::send('emails.exception', compact('css','content'), function ($message) {
                $message->to(['youremail1@gmail.com','youremail2@gmail.com'])
                                    ->subject('Exception: ' . \Request::fullUrl());
            });
        } catch (Throwable $exception) {
            Log::error($exception);
        }
    }


}