I got tired of debugging Laravel queues blind — so I built a free dashboard (no Redis needed)

I was working on a Laravel project for a client — standard stuff, database queue driver, shared hosting, nothing fancy. A payment job started failing silently. No alert. No dashboard. Just a frustrated client asking why invoices weren't being sent. I opened the failed_jobs table and started reading raw JSON stack traces. Then I ran php artisan queue:work with my eyes glued to the terminal. Then I wrote a quick throwaway script to query the jobs table. You know the feeling. The obvious fix is Laravel Horizon — it's a beautiful dashboard and I've used it many times. But Horizon requires Redis. This project was on shared hosting with no Redis. And honestly, for a small project, spinning up Redis just to get queue visibility felt like overkill. So I spent a few evenings building something lightweight. What I built Lightweight Queue Inspector — a debugging dashboard for Laravel apps using the database queue driver. No Redis. No Horizon. Just your existing jobs and failed_jobs tables. Here's