Immutable Date Casting in Laravel 8.53

The Laravel team released 8.53 with immutable date and datetime casting, a queue monitoring command, and the latest changes in the 8.x branch:

Immutable Date and Datetime Casting

Adam Campbell contributed two new model casts: immutable_date and immutable_datetime. It maintains support for all current date/datetime functionality, except it returns a CarbonImmutable instance instead of Carbon.

I recently got into the habit of using CarbonImmutable in parts of my apps instead of Carbon, especially when juggling timestamps across time zones.

With that in mind, I created a Laravel PR to allow for casting date and datetime values to immutable: https://t.co/cVSnYqivyo
— Adam Campbell (@hotmeteor) August 1, 2021

Check out Pull Request #38199 for further details on the implementation. To get started with date casts, check out the Date Casting documentation.

Queue Monitoring Artisan Command

Mohamed Said contributed a new queue:monitor artisan command that will check the sizes of all queues provided and output them in a console:

A twiceDailyAt Scheduler Method

Doug Sisk contributed a twiceDailyAt scheduler frequency that allows setting the specific minutes past an hour to run at:

$schedule
  ->command('example:command')
  ->twiceDailyAt(first: 2, second: 14, offset: 5);

"Accepted If" Validation Rule

Anees Khan contributed an accepted_if validation rule, which means a field must be "truthy" if another field under validation is equal to a specific value. This is useful for validating terms of service or other similar confirmation flows:

$v = new Validator(
    $trans,
    [
        'foo' => 'true',
        'bar' => 'aaa'
    ],
    [
        'foo' => 'accepted_if:bar,aaa'
    ]
);

$this->assertTrue($v->passes());