Throw (exception) behaviour in Laravel 5.4 and 5.5

The issue is about when an error is catched and and an exception is thrown:

try {        
    $response = $gateway->purchase($data)->send();

} catch (\Exception $e) {

    throw $e;

}

My situation is that I am running Laravel 5.5.4 locally, and on the remote server the project is running on Laravel 5.4.36.

Locally, throw $e results in that an object is returned with status code 500 , and the object looks something like:

{
    "message": "Card number is invalid",
    "exception": "Omnipay\\Common\\Exception\\InvalidCreditCardException",
    "file": "C:\\path\path",
    "line": 288,
    "trace": [ (stuff) ]

I can print the error message by using the "message" property.

BUT on the server, throw $e results in returning status 500 with an html page - the "Whoops, looks like something went wrong." - page. That's not an object , so I can't get the error message.

I have tried setting "APP_DEBUG" to true or false, but it doesn't matter.

Is the difference in behaviour due to the difference in Laravel versions? Can I make a change so that throw $e returns an object in the same way as in the local version? How is this behaviour controlled?

via Chebli Mohamed