Reel

Reel is browser session replay for Laravel applications. A small recorder in your application captures a privacy-filtered copy of what happened on the page and sends it to a Reel deployment you run. Reel does not record video or take screenshots. It records the page's DOM (the structure the browser builds from your HTML) plus the changes, clicks and scrolls that happened to it, and rebuilds the page from that stream when you replay it.

When one of your own requests returns a 5xx while a session is recording, Reel puts a marker on that session's timeline with the method, path and status, so you can jump to the moment it broke. Optionally, the recorded session id can travel in Laravel Context to whatever Nightwatch transport the application already uses, so an exception can carry a link back to the recording.

Reel is open source under the MIT license. Recordings are written to a private bucket in your own Laravel Cloud account and are never sent to Artisan Build.

What Reel does not do

Reel answers one question: what did this user do before the error? It is not an analytics suite. There are no heatmaps, no funnels, no native mobile SDKs, and no console logs or network bodies in a recording. Canvas, WebGL, video, audio and cross-origin iframe content are not recorded, and there is no video export. Playback never loads anything from the network, so external images, fonts and stylesheets appear as placeholders.

Reel only records Laravel applications, and the application you record must run Laravel 13.

Experimental

Reel is an Experimental app. It runs, but it has not yet finished the browser, privacy, performance, cost and retention evidence needed to be a fully supported product. Through Scalpels, a new Reel install is available to supporters (the Supporter tier) and partner teams. Start with a consented pilot, and read Privacy and capture before you record real users.

How it fits with Scalpels

Scalpels forks artisan-build/reel into your GitHub account, creates the Laravel Cloud resources Reel's manifest declares, and deploys it. Reel is not a Scalpels provider: Scalpels does not attach applications to it. You connect each application yourself by installing the Reel client package and running its enrollment command, which keeps the signing key inside your application. Your agent can reach Reel's read-only MCP tools through the Scalpels MCP server.

In these docs

• Getting started: install Reel through Scalpels, see what the install provisions, and sign in.
• Connecting your apps: create an application in Reel, install the client, enroll it, and start recording.
• Privacy and capture: what the recorder masks and blocks, how to hide routes and elements, and how consent works.
• Sessions and replay: how a session becomes playable, searching sessions, the player, and error markers.
• Retention and deletion: the 30-day expiry, protecting recordings, deleting a session, and erasing one user's history.
• Configuration: application settings, signing credentials, the client's environment values, and Reel's fixed limits.
• Agents and MCP: the three read-only MCP tools and how to reach them.
• Troubleshooting: the failures you are likely to see and how to fix them.

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