Fun facts about dd()

Here are some things I learnt about Laravel's little "dump and die" function dd() this week.

First, the function actually takes as many parameters as you want, and it will dump them all out for you. I'm sure a couple of times I've had to request a page twice, dumping a different variable each time just to see the state of each of them (I really should just get some breakpoint stuff going).

// As many parameters as you like...
dd($user, $request);

// ...or an array
dd([$user, $post]);

The next cool thing is that the functionality of dd() is going to change a little in Laravel 5.1. If you take a look at this accepted PR you can see that the function will now quit with a return code of 1 (instead of 0, previously). This is a great change for when you're testing, as previously it was possible for dd()s to exist in your code, get run in your PHPUnit test suite and not break anything. Now that they return 1 they'll force your tests to fail.