Laravel, a widely popular PHP framework for several years, continues to be a top choice for developers and PHP-focused companies. Known for its scalability, reliability, and elegance, Laravel offers versatility that appeals to many. With the release of Laravel 9, this framework introduces numerous new features. In the past, the six-month release cycle sparked questions, criticisms, and confusion regarding the process and rationale. However, the release schedule has now been revised to occur every three months. This change aims to ensure that each release delivers a more substantial and comprehensive update, rather than smaller, more frequent ones.
Laravel 9 was launched in February 2022, marking the adoption of a 12-month major release cycle. This article explores the process of transitioning to Laravel 9 and highlights the exciting new features that have been added. If you’re using previous versions, upgrading to Laravel 9 offers compelling reasons to be enthusiastic.
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What Is Laravel?
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Key Features of Laravel
Eloquent ORM
Artisan CLI
MVC Architecture
Automatic Pagination
Security
What's New in Laravel Latest Version?
Scheduled to be released by September 2021, Laravel 9’s release was pushed back to January 2022. In addition, a long-term support version is still in development; original plans (as opposed to actual schedules) had been for it to be released by September 2021 but was delayed until after a 12-month program. This delay is said to have been caused by multiple factors, including:
- Inspired by Symfony, Laravel will rebuild the new version 9.0 in 2021. This means that when it comes to using third-party plugins and modules, you’ll be able to use PHP versions 5.4, 7.0 or 7.1 to manage packages automatically and create your bundles easily distributed through packagist.
- The delay will afford the team two months to watch Laravel interact with Symfony 4.2’s new features. It also gives them time to fix any mistakes that might be present from the upgrade if anything unexpected occurs.
- Lastly, delaying Laravel 9 better positions the Laravel team for yearly future releases. With two months of additional ramp-up time after Symfony’s release, Laracasts training is ready to teach you what exactly is going on code-wise with the new version of Laravel and teach you how to use it.
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New Features in Laravel 9
Minimum PHP Requirement
Laravel isn’t the only one to benefit from the recent advancements in PHP. With PHP 8 and using it for your development increases your output. According to this article by Zend, “Laravel 9 requires the latest PHP 8 because Laravel 9 will be made with Symfony v6.0, which also requires PHP 8”. Compared to other languages such as NodeJS or Python (those shown in orange) or Ruby such as “Soft Will Eat You Alive”, can you imagine how much time is wasted waiting for a page load? It takes 3x seconds or more! But with new language extensions making use of PHP 8 and pipelining support, they improved the time of individual function calls.
Anonymous Stub Migration
Laravel sets to make anonymous stub migration the default behaviour when you run the famous migration command `artisan migrate`:
The anonymous stub migration feature was first introduced in Laravel 8.37 to solve this Github issue. The question was how to eliminate a potential code collision, as two migrations with the same class name can cause problematic errors when trying to recreate the database from scratch, which needs to be done on occasions where all existing data and test data are cleared out.
In Laravel 8.37, the framework now supports anonymous class migration files, and the default behaviour will be to use them in Laravel 9.
New Query Builder Interface
This version introduces a new Illuminate\Contracts\Database\QueryBuilder interface, along with the Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Concerns\DecoratesQueryBuilder trait, which will be implemented in place of the __call magic method.
PHP 8 String Functions
Since the latest Laravel release works in tandem with the newest PHP 8, Laravel recommends that you use the latest string functions available to work on your Laravel application.
Laravel 9 is full of new features and improvements. For example, the company \Illuminate\Support\Str class has methods to check if some text contains another string, starts with it, or ends with it, which comes in handy a lot of times during app development. Most of these changes we’ve discussed will require breaking changes, so you’ll need to be careful about this when upgrading your system to the newest version.
How to Install Laravel 9
The command above will create a new Laravel project with the name laravel-9-dev and use the latest storage driver available, Redis.
Another excellent method is to use the Laravel global CLI to create a new Laravel project via the 9 terminal command. For example, to initialize a Laravel application using the dev branch, you would enter into your terminal:
It should present you with the Laravel development version of Laravel 9.
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Summary
Laravel is a compelling PHP framework that currently powers thousands of applications. Laravel 9 is the latest release, with many exciting new features added, including support for scheduling jobs and service providers to work in Laravel Mix for compiling SASS and CSS. We can be sure that the team behind it will continue to create goodies as this framework expands into something even more significant.
We, at Syndell, provide laravel development services. So, what are you most excited about in the new versions of Laravel? By sharing your answers with us in the comments section below, let us know. For more laravel news, Syndell is the answer!
FAQs
No, Laravel 9 is not an LTS version. The current LTS version of Laravel is 8.17, which was released in December 2020. Laravel 9 was released in March 2021 and is the latest non-LTS version.
The major update in Laravel 9 is the new blade component system. The new system allows developers to create and reuse custom components across their projects. Additionally, the new system allows developers to write their custom directives, which can be used to create complex HTML structures quickly. There are also various improvements to the Laravel Router, Eloquent, and the query builder.
The minimum required version of PHP for Laravel 9 is PHP 7.3. Laravel 9 is compatible with PHP 7.3 and higher.
The main benefits of upgrading to Laravel 9 are as follows:
- Improved Authorization and Gate System: The authorization and gate system in Laravel 9 have been improved to provide more granular control over user access.
- Improved Validation Rules and Error Messages: Laravel 9 has improved validation rules and error messages, making them more user-friendly and easier to understand.
- Updated Blade Components: Laravel 9 includes updated Blade components which offer more flexibility in creating dynamic views.
- Improved Routing System: Laravel 9 has an improved routing system, making it easier to create routes and handle requests.
- Better Performance and Security: By upgrading to Laravel 9, you can benefit from better performance and security.
New Features: Laravel 9 introduces some new features that can make your development process simpler and faster.