Laravel 5.2 — A Look at what’s coming

UPDATE: Laravel 5.2 is now released.

Laravel 5.2 development is underway and so far a few nice additions have been announced. Let’s take a look at everything we know is coming to the release.

Auth Scaffolding

Making a come back is the auth scaffolding which will automatically create a base set of view files for authentication, registration, and password resets. This will be ran via:

php artisan make:auth

Implicit model binding

Implicit model binding is a new feature that automatically binds a model to a route. Here is an example in code:

Route::get('/api/posts/{post}', function(Post $post) {
    return $post;
});

What this does is behind the scenes call Post::findOrFail($post) and injects it into the $post variable. For the seasoned Laravel developers, this is similar to the existing route model binding but now removes the step of having to bind it manually.

Appending output from scheduled tasks

The Laravel Scheduler will now be able to append output from the task to a file.

$schedule->command('emails:send')
    ->hourly()
    ->appendOutputTo($filePath);

Previously, Laravel included a sendOutputTo option which would write the current results but not append.

Laravel 5.2 Form Array Validation

This is a feature I’m excited about. Pretend you have a form with an array of input fields like this:

<p>
<input type="text" name="person[1][id]">
<input type="text" name="person[1][name]">
</p>
<p>
<input type="text" name="person[2][id]">
<input type="text" name="person[2][name]">
</p>

In Laravel 5.1 to add validation rules it required looping through and adding the rules individually. Instead of having to do all that it’s been “Laravelized” into this:

$v = Validator::make($request->all(), [
  'person.*.id' => 'exists:users.id',
  'person.*.name' => 'required:string',
]);

Collections Wildcards

When using a collection and wanting to pull out data, you can now pass a * as a wildcard:

$posts->pluck(‘posts.*.title’);

This will return all title’s for all posts.

Database Session Driver

The database session driver now includes user_id and ip_address so you can easily clear all sessions for a given user.

MySQL JSON Column Types

MySQL 5.7.8 added support for a native JSON data type. Laravel 5.2 now adds support for this column type.

Upcoming Laravel 5.2 release also supports creating new MySQL JSON column types!

— Laravel (@laravelphp) November 13, 2015

Middleware Groups

Laravel 5.2: middleware groups allow you to apply group of middlware to routes, https://t.co/qpEELi2SUn https://t.co/h3tIDe9yIb

— Taylor Otwell (@taylorotwell) December 9, 2015

Bind Injection Values

Fresh Laravel 5.2 feature… bind injection values for simple class primitives that aren't type-hinted: https://t.co/FupcGQr5LD

— Taylor Otwell (@taylorotwell) December 17, 2015

More To Come…

As the release date for Laravel 5.2 gets closer I’m certain more new features will be announced and I will keep this post updated along the way. Be sure and join the Laravel newsletter to stay up to date.