Set up NightOwl with a free Supabase Postgres

composer require nightowl/agent

NIGHTOWL_DB_HOST=aws-0-eu-west-3.pooler.supabase.com
NIGHTOWL_DB_PORT=5432
NIGHTOWL_DB_DATABASE=postgres
NIGHTOWL_DB_USERNAME=postgres.
NIGHTOWL_DB_PASSWORD=
NIGHTOWL_TOKEN=
NIGHTOWL_APP_ID= 

Then run the installer:
 
bash
php artisan nightowl:install
 
 nightowl:install publishes config/nightowl.php and runs the schema migrations against the nightowl connection — creating all nightowl_* tables in your Supabase database. The migrations run from your Laravel app, not from the NightOwl dashboard.
 
 
STEP 04
 
 
 
[ SCREENSHOT PENDING ]
 
Terminal output showing 'composer require nightowl/agent' completing, followed by 'php artisan nightowl:install' running migrations on the nightowl connection.
 
 
  
 
Step 5 — Start the agent and verify telemetry
 

Run the agent process. In dev:
 
bash
php artisan nightowl:agent
 

In production, supervise it the same way you supervise queue workers — Supervisor, systemd, or your platform's worker config. Forge users can add it as a daemon; the docs page at docs.usenightowl.com has copy-paste configs.
 

Now hit any route in your Laravel app. Within a few seconds, you should see the request appear in the Requests tab of the NightOwl dashboard.
 
 
STEP 05
 
 
 
[ SCREENSHOT PENDING ]
 
NightOwl Requests tab showing the just-fired request with route, status code, p95 timing, and a 'received 3 seconds ago' badge.
 
 
  
 
Step 6 — Tune retention for the 500 MB free tier
 

Out of the box, NightOwl retains 14 days of telemetry. On a 500 MB Supabase free tier, drop that to 2 days. Add this to your Laravel .env:
 
bash
NIGHTOWL_RETENTION_DAYS=2
 

Then schedule the prune command in routes/console.php so old rows get cleaned up automatically:
 
php
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schedule;

Schedule::command('nightowl:prune')->daily();
 

Or run it manually whenever you want to free space: php artisan nightowl:prune.
 
 nightowl:prune deletes rows older than NIGHTOWL_RETENTION_DAYS across all 11 telemetry tables (requests, queries, exceptions, jobs, scheduled tasks, mail, notifications, cache events, outgoing requests, commands, logs). It's a single retention value — there's no per-table tuning at the moment.
 
 
STEP 06
 
 
 
[ SCREENSHOT PENDING ]
 
Terminal output of 'php artisan nightowl:prune' showing per-table delete counts after pruning, with the Laravel scheduler config visible alongside.
 
 
  
 
When to upgrade to Supabase Pro
 

Four signals it's time to leave the free tier:
 
 
Dashboard pages take more than ~2 seconds to load — shared compute is the bottleneck, not NightOwl. Pro gives you a dedicated 2-core instance and unthrottled IOPS, which usually drops query times by 5-10×.
 
Database hits 80% of 500 MB even with 2-day retention — you're past low-volume territory; Pro at $25/mo gives you 8 GB and real backups.
 
You need 30+ day retention for incident post-mortems — at typical SaaS traffic, that's well past 500 MB.
 
You want point-in-time recovery — free tier has none. Pro adds 7-day PITR.
 
 

Total stack at that point: $15 NightOwl Team + $25 Supabase Pro = $40/month, all-in, with 8 GB of telemetry retention and no per-event metering. Compare that to Sentry or Datadog at equivalent volume.
 
 
THE QUICK PATH
 
Already have a Supabase URI? Skip to install.
 

Two commands plus the agent token. No Docker, no Postgres ops, no infrastructure to maintain.
 
bash
composer require nightowl/agent
php artisan nightowl:install
 

From $5/month flat for NightOwl. 14-day free trial. Database stays $0 on Supabase free tier.