Laravel 8.51 Released

The Laravel team released 8.51 with stack traces included in failed HTTP tests, a new blade directive to render a CSS class string dynamically, and the latest changes in the 8.x branch:

#Track Exceptions and Display Them in Failed Tests

Taylor Otwell and Jess Archer contributed the output of the exception stack trace when an HTTP test returns an unexpected 500 status code.

Previously, you'd have to temporarily disable exception handling to see the exception stack trace:

$this->withoutExceptionHandling();
 
// If an error happens, you would only see
// the failed status code check.
$this->get('/example')->assertOk();

Now, you'll see the failed status check, along with the exception stack trace:

Seeing stack traces you didn't expect is such a nice quality-of-life improvement when writing tests; thank you, Taylor and Jess!

#Display Unexpected Validation Errors When Asserting HTTP Status

In addition to displaying HTTP stack traces for unexpected errors in HTTP tests, Jess Archer also contributed outputting JSON validation errors that occurred when asserting status codes other than 422.

This feature is helpful in quickly seeing unexpected validation errors instead of using debugging tools to see them. In my research, this feature isn't displaying validation errors in userland tests at the time of release—check out my comment on Pull Request #38046 for details.

#The @class Blade Directive

Dan Harrin contributed a @class Blade directive that allows developers to use conditional classes on any HTML element:

<div>
    <span @class([
        'text-sm',
        'font-bold' => $active,
    ])>
        Dashboard
    </span>
 
    <svg @class([
        'w-6 h-6',
        'text-indigo-600' => $active,
    ])>
        <path />
        <path />
        <path />
    </svg>
</div>

See the conditional classes documentation for details on this new directive.

#Release Notes

You can see the full list of new features and updates below and the diff between 8.50.0 and 8.51.0 on GitHub. The following release notes are directly from the changelog:

#v8.51.0

#Added

• Allow dynamically customizing connection for queued event listener (#38005, ebc3ce4)
• Added @class Blade directive (#38016)
• Accept closure for retry() sleep (#38035)
• The controller can directly return the stdClass object (#38033)
• Make FilesystemAdapter macroable (#38030)
• Track exceptions and display them on failed status checks for dx (#38025)
• Display unexpected validation errors when asserting status (#38046)
• Ability to return the default value of a request whenHas and whenFilled methods (#38060)
• Added Filesystem::replaceInFile() method (#38069)

#Fixed

• Fixed passing cursor to pagination methods (#37996)
• Fixed issue with cursor pagination and Json resources (#38026)
• ErrorException: Undefined array key "exception" (#38059)
• Fixed unvalidated array keys without implicit attributes (#38052)

#Changed

• Passthrough excluded uri's in maintenance mode (#38041)
• Allow for named arguments via dispatchable trait (#38066)