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PHP

See what your PHP application is doing in Logfire: the requests it handles, how long each one took, and which ones failed. This takes about five minutes.

PHP does not have a dedicated Logfire SDK, but Logfire is built on OpenTelemetry (OTel), the open industry standard for collecting traces, metrics, and logs. The standard OpenTelemetry PHP SDK sends data straight to Logfire once you point it at the right endpoint, and you get traces (the full journey of one request, made of nested spans, where a span is one unit of work with a name, a start, and a duration) in the Logfire UI.

Before you start

You need:

  • A Logfire project and a write token (the credential your app uses to send data to a Logfire project). Copy one from Project → Settings → Write tokens; see Create Write Tokens.
  • PHP 8.1 or newer and Composer.

Send your first trace

1. Install the OpenTelemetry packages

Terminal
composer require open-telemetry/sdk open-telemetry/exporter-otlp php-http/guzzle7-adapter

The OTLP exporter needs an HTTP client; php-http/guzzle7-adapter provides one.

2. Configure the exporter

Terminal
export OTEL_PHP_AUTOLOAD_ENABLED=true
export OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=hello-php
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://logfire-us.pydantic.dev
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS='Authorization=your-write-token'
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=http/protobuf

With OTEL_PHP_AUTOLOAD_ENABLED=true, the SDK builds a tracer provider from these variables when your app loads and flushes it automatically when the script ends. The endpoint above is for the US data region; use https://logfire-eu.pydantic.dev for the EU region.

3. Add the code

hello.php
<?php
require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

\OpenTelemetry\API\Globals::tracerProvider()
    ->getTracer('hello-php')
    ->spanBuilder('Hello World')
    ->startSpan()
    ->end();

4. Run it

Terminal
php hello.php

See it in the Live view

Open the Live view in Logfire. Your Hello World span appears as it arrives:

Traces arriving in the Logfire Live view

Each row is one span, with its service, name, and duration. The screenshot shows a busier app; your run appears as its own row, service hello-php and span Hello World, which you can click to open the full trace.

Troubleshooting

SymptomLikely causeFix
composer require or the run fails: no PSR-18 HTTP client foundThe OTLP exporter needs an HTTP client that isn’t installedInstall php-http/guzzle7-adapter (or another PSR-18 client)
The script runs but nothing appearsAutoloading is off, so no tracer provider is builtSet OTEL_PHP_AUTOLOAD_ENABLED=true
Nothing arrives from a self-hosted instance with a private certificatePHP’s HTTP client does not trust the private CA, and the OpenTelemetry certificate variable is ignoredSet openssl.cafile=/path/to/ca.pem in your php.ini (or pass php -d openssl.cafile=/path/to/ca.pem)

Next steps