Installation

Laravel Brain is installed as a dev dependency — it's a development tool, not something you need in production.

Install the package

composer require --dev laramint/laravel-brain

Laravel will auto-discover the service provider. No manual registration needed.

TIP

Everything — the /_laravel-brain routes, Artisan commands, and MCP server — only registers when app()->environment('local'). Since it's a require-dev dependency, it's absent entirely from a production build (composer install --no-dev).

Storage Driver

Scan output (the graph) can be persisted in one of two ways, selected with the driver config key (env LARAVEL_BRAIN_DRIVER):

Driver	Where it stores	Setup
file (default)	.graph-*.json files under storage/app/laravel-brain/	none
database	a database table (laravel_brain_graphs)	none — table auto-created on first scan

Use the database driver when storage/ is not writable or not shared between the web and CLI processes (read-only containers, multi-node deploys):

LARAVEL_BRAIN_DRIVER=database
# Optional — defaults to laravel_brain_graphs
LARAVEL_BRAIN_DB_TABLE=laravel_brain_graphs

By default it uses your app's default connection. You can instead point it at a dedicated database with its own credentials — no need to edit config/database.php. Set the connection name to the bundled laravel-brain connection and fill in its credentials:

LARAVEL_BRAIN_DB_CONNECTION=laravel-brain

LARAVEL_BRAIN_DB_DRIVER=mysql
LARAVEL_BRAIN_DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
LARAVEL_BRAIN_DB_PORT=3306
LARAVEL_BRAIN_DB_DATABASE=laravel_brain
LARAVEL_BRAIN_DB_USERNAME=brain
LARAVEL_BRAIN_DB_PASSWORD=secret

Or set LARAVEL_BRAIN_DB_CONNECTION to the name of any existing connection already defined in your config/database.php. All reads/writes honour the chosen connection.

The graph table is created automatically the first time you run a scan (brain:scan or the "Scan" button in the UI) — no php artisan migrate step is required. If the table already exists, it is left untouched.

If you'd rather manage the table with your normal migrations instead, publish the migration and run it yourself:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=laravel-brain-migrations
php artisan migrate

Output Files

With the default file driver, brain:scan writes these files to storage/app/laravel-brain/:

.graph-manifest.json   — Tab manifest (list of all route tabs)
.graph-{tab-id}.json   — Per-route subgraph (one per route)

Every scan rewrites the whole set and drops the subgraphs it did not write, so a tab disappears from the viewer when the route behind it disappears from the application.

They are safe to gitignore:

storage/app/laravel-brain/

(The database driver stores the same payloads as rows in the configured table.)

Security

The /_laravel-brain routes, the artisan commands, and the MCP server are all only registered in the local environment by default. Since it's a require-dev dependency, it will not be present in production builds (composer install --no-dev).

WARNING

If you do install it in a non-production environment accessible over a network, consider protecting the routes with middleware.