Laravel 12 will be launched on Monday, February 24th, 2025, and will primarily be a maintenance release.
On a post X, Taylor said,
This is primarily a maintenance focused release that updates upstream dependencies and has minimal breaking changes or major few features.
Because of that, the vast majority of applications will be able to upgrade with no changes to your application's code. 🚀
As more and more applications are built with Laravel, we're focusing on shipping new features continually throughout the year without breaking changes, with our yearly releases being utilized to update dependencies or address new PHP version compatibility.
New Features
As Taylor mentioned, they continually focus on shipping new features and are currently on a weekly release schedule. You can see all our coverage of every Laravel release this year, but some of the highlights of Laravel 11 that have been added since its official release include:
- A fluent helper
- Reversible form prompts
- Anonymous Event Broadcasting
- A new minimal default exception page with dark mode support
- chopStart and chopEnd string helpers
- deduplicate helper
- Chaperone Eloquent Models
- Composer run dev command
New Starter Kits
When the release comes out, the Laravel team will launch new starter kits, including React, Vue, or Livewire support.
These will include Shadcn components, and for the Livewire stack, there is the option for a free version of Flux components.
Each starter kit will be pulled from separate Github repos and installed directly into your app. This will allow you complete control over all the code instead of being hidden inside your vendor like a package.
New Laravel Website
Another new thing coming is a new home page for Laravel with new branding.
Upgrading to Laravel 12
We chatted with Jason McCreary, who runs Laravel Shift, about the Laravel 12 upgrades and another feature Shift provides the community by automatically sending PRs to Laravel Packages so they are ready the day a major release comes out.
This is huge because before that, if you used any 3rd party package, you had to rely on them updating their dependencies to support the latest version, and sometimes that could take weeks or months.
