Laracon Recap

The 2023 Laracon US is now wrapped up, and it was a fantastic week of new product releases, training, inspiration, and meeting new and old friends. One big announcement before the conference is that I will now go full-time on Laravel News starting in September! I'm super stoked about that and to be able to dedicate way more time to the site and the weekly Laravel newsletter. Now on to Laracon...

#Pest Updates

First up was Nuno on stage announcing Pest's "Spicy Summer" release. This release is full of new features, and I'm most excited about Snapshot Testing, which allows you to assert that the output of a function or method has not changed. It's a great way to test your codebase and ensure your code is not changing unexpectedly.

#Laravel Prompts

Next, in product announcements, is Laravel Prompts that Jess Archer demoed. It's a powerful new CLI prompt feature coming to Laravel that allows you to do everything from select options to checklists and more. All in a beautiful output. We'll have a post on this coming this week.

Photo by Chris Arter

#Laravel Volt and Laravel Folio

To round out day one, Taylor went through Volt and Folio, and they seem like really cool additions. Laravel Folio is a new automatic file and directory-based routing system. Volt is a single-file Livewire component. This allows you to mix php and blade in the same file. It's neat, especially for small, well-defined components that only need a Model mounted.

Photo by caneco

#Laravel Herd

Another big new product developed by BeyondCode is Laravel Herd. Herd is a native macOS application that bundles everything you need to run Laravel. Not only will this make onboarding new developers easy, but it also can take the place of Valet.

#Laravel Livewire V3

Livewire v3 beta! Caleb launched v3 live on stage, including many new features. Give our post a read, as it covers all the big details.

#Native PHP

NativePHP is a new way to build native applications using the tools you already know. Think of building a native macOS app using Laravel.

#Laravel Precognition

Tim MacDonald demoed Laravel Precognition, and it allows you to anticipate the outcome of a future HTTP request. One of the primary use cases of Precognition is the ability to provide "live" validation for your frontend JavaScript application without duplicating your application's backend validation rules.

#Laravel 11

Yes, Taylor demoed some of the new features of Laravel 11 that is due out later this year.

#Final Wrapup

This post outlines some of the new features announced. The other talks are all well worth watching once the videos come out. We also have some photos from the event on our Instagram page.