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laravel/tinker
Powerful REPL for the Laravel framework.
Laravel Tinker is a thin wrapper around PsySH that boots a full Laravel application context inside an interactive REPL. It's for Laravel developers who want to poke at models, run queries, and test code snippets without writing a throwaway route or Artisan command.
Ships with Laravel out of the box so there's zero setup for existing projects. ClassAliasAutoloader means you can type `User::all()` instead of `App\Models\User::all()` — small thing, surprisingly useful in practice. TinkerCaster adds Laravel-aware pretty-printing for Eloquent models and collections, so output is actually readable. The PsySH foundation gives you real features: history, tab completion, and `doc` / `show` commands to inspect PHP internals without leaving the REPL.
It's essentially a config shim over PsySH; the actual REPL work happens upstream, so Tinker itself has almost no surface area to improve or extend. State doesn't persist between sessions, so you can't save a useful variable and come back to it later. Running it on production is an obvious footgun — there's a configurable allow-list of commands, but the default is permissive and teams routinely forget to lock it down. The README is a single paragraph pointing elsewhere, which is fine if you already know Laravel but useless if you're evaluating it.