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1. Sign up and create your app

Create your NightOwl account at usenightowl.com/signup, add your application, and connect your PostgreSQL database. You’ll get an agent token to authenticate your instance.

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2. Install the packages

Add Laravel Nightwatch (if you haven’t already) and the NightOwl agent to your Laravel app: 
composer require laravel/nightwatch nightowl/agent

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3. Configure environment variables

Add these to your .env file: 
NIGHTWATCH_TOKEN=your-agent-token
NIGHTOWL_DB_HOST=your-pg-host
NIGHTOWL_DB_PORT=5432
NIGHTOWL_DB_DATABASE=nightowl
NIGHTOWL_DB_USERNAME=nightowl
NIGHTOWL_DB_PASSWORD=your-password
NIGHTWATCH_TOKEN is the token you copy from the NightOwl dashboard — the Laravel Nightwatch package reads it to authenticate outgoing telemetry, and the NightOwl agent uses it to authenticate inbound payloads. For a standalone NightOwl setup this is the only token you need.NIGHTOWL_TOKEN is a separate variable used only when you’re running NightOwl alongside Nightwatch’s hosted agent and need to distinguish the two tokens. Don’t set it for a standard install.

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4. Run the agent

php artisan nightowl:agent
The agent starts on port 2407 by default. Nightwatch will automatically send telemetry to it.

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5. Open the dashboard

Go to usenightowl.com and select your app. You should see data flowing in within seconds.
The agent creates all required database tables automatically on first run. No manual migrations needed.

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Next steps

Full agent documentation

Every environment variable, sampling, redaction, supervisord/systemd recipes, and testing setup.

Health monitoring

Read ingest rate, drain rate, and buffer depth — and know when to scale.

Alert channels

Wire Slack, Discord, email, or webhooks for new-issue notifications.

MCP server

Let Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor browse and update issues from your editor.