Laravel 9 Released: What Should You Expect?

News February 10th 2022

The newly released Laravel 9 is highly scalable and comes with so many new features, including a minimum PHP v8.0 version, controller route groups, a refreshed default Ignition error page, Laravel Scout database engine, Symfony mailer integration, Flysystem 3.x, Improved Eloquent accessors/mutators, and various other features. 

Earlier, Laravel updates were released every 6th month. However, with the latest release of Laravel 9 in February 2022, the company has moved its framework to a 12-month major release cycle.

New Laravel 9 is the next long-term support version (LTS) and will receive bug fixes until February 2024 and security fixes until February 2025. 

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What is Laravel?

Laravel is an open-source PHP web application framework that is known for its elegant syntax. It includes an MVC framework that can be used to build simple to complex web applications using PHP programming language. It strictly adheres to the MVC (model-view-controller) architectural pattern.

Laravel also uses various community-driven packages as well as Symfony components to utilize several features within the framework. 

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New Features of Laravel 9 

The new features and improvements that you can expect in the newly released Laravel 9 are –

Minimum PHP Requirement 

First things first, Laravel requires the latest PHP 8 and PHPUnit 8 for testing. This is because Laravel 9 has the newest Symfony 6.0, which also operates on PHP 8.

PHP 8 has new features from the JIT compile to constructor property promotion.

Anonymous Stub Migration 

When you run the popular migration command (given below), Laravel will make anonymous stub migration behavior.

php artisan make:migration

As the anonymous stub migration feature was released in Laravel 8.37 to fix the Github issues, the new Laravel 9 framework that too supports anonymous class migration files, will now set it up to default behavior.

New Query Builder Interface 

The new Laravel 9 provides type hinting a highly reliable for refactoring, static analysis, and code completion in their IDEs. 

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PHP 8 String Functions 

New Design for routes:list

New test ‘—coverage’ options display coverage directly in the terminal

Mailer function moved from SwiftMailer to Symfony Mailer.

Improvised Eloquent Accessors/Mutators

Flysystem 3.x

Implicit Route building with Enums (PHP 8.1)

Controller Route Groups

Enum Eloquent Attribute Casting

Forced Scoped Bindings

Laravel Breeze API & Next.js

Laravel Scout Database Engine

Full-Text Indexes and Where Clauses

Inline Blade Templates rendering

Soketi Echo Server

Optional Bootstrap 5 Pagination View

Improvised Ignition Exception Page

New ‘str()’ and ‘to_route()’ helper functions.

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How To Install Laravel 9?

If you want to use the new Laravel 9 for development and testing purposes, then you can easily do it now on your machine.

Laravel 9 also supports PHP version 8, so make sure to check your PHP version or do a fresh installation.

Using composer, you can install Laravel 9. Simply run the following command:

composer create-project –prefer-dist laravel/laravel laravel-9-dev dev-develop

The above command will create a new Laravel project with the name Laravel-9-dev that uses the latest Laravel 9.

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How To Upgrade Laravel From 8.x to 9?

The up-gradation process may take nearly around 30 minutes.

To Update Dependencies –

Laravel now needs to have PHP 8.0.2 or greater.

Composer Dependencies

Firstly, you will have to update the following dependencies in your application’s composer.json file:

• laravel/framework to ^9.0
• nunomaduro/collision to ^6.1
  

Once, it is done. Now, replace facade/ignition with “spatie/laravel-ignition”: “^1.0 

In the same composer.json file.

Now, see if you are using any third-party packages and verify from the support that now you have Laravel 9 updated.

#PHP Return Types

Laravel 9 has implemented offsetGet, offsetSet, etc. return types in its codebase. These should actually not affect the user-written code, however in case you are overriding one of these methods by extending Laravel’s core classes, then you will have to add the following return types, to your own application packages or to the package code:

• count(): int
• getIterator(): Traversable
• getSize(): int
• jsonSerialize(): array
• offsetExists($key): bool
• offsetGet($key): mixed
• offsetSet($key, $value): void
• offsetUnset($key): void
  

Now, check if Laravel 9 has been updated.

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