Laravel 8.6 Released

The Laravel team released 8.4, 8.5, and 8.6 over the last week with plenty of new features including SQLite schema dump support, auto-handling castAsJson values that are “Jsonable,” an artisan command for clearing queues, along with the latest new features, fixes, and changes in the 8.x branch.

#SQLite Schema Dump Support

Paras Malhotra contributed SQLite support for the new schema:dump artisan command. Laravel 8 introduced this feature to squash large migrations into a single SQL file as an application’s migration files grow.

#Auto-Handling castAsJson()

Andrew Brown contributed a castAsJson() method to the base test case, which now supports auto-casting of Jsonable and array values:

$this->assertDatabaseHas('users', [
    'name' => $user->name,
    'email' => $user->email,
    'nicknames' => $this->castAsJson($user->nicknames->toJson()),
];

#Clearing Queues with Artisan

Paras Malhotra contributed an artisan queue:clear command you can use in development (and perhaps in some emergency production issues) to clear your application’s queue:

# Delete all jobs from the default queue
php artisan queue:clear
 
# Clear jobs on the redis connection and the "emails" queue
php artisan queue:clear redis --queue=emails

#Take Until Timeout on Lazy Collections

Joseph Silber contributed a takeUntilTimeout method to lazy collections, which lets you stop a long-running process after a given timeout:

$lazyCollection
    ->takeUntilTimeout(now()->add(2, 'minutes'))
    ->each(fn ($item) => doSomethingThatMayTakeSomeTime($item));
 
// ^^ This will only process items for up to 2 minutes ^^

#Release Notes

You can see the full list of new features and updates below and the diff between 8.4.0 and 8.6.0 on GitHub. The following release notes are directly from the changelog:

#v8.6.0

#Added

• Added Illuminate\Collections\LazyCollection::takeUntilTimeout() (0aabf24)
• Added --schema-path option to migrate:fresh command (#34419)

#Fixed

• Fixed problems with dots in validator (#34355)
• Maintenance mode: Fix empty Retry-After header (#34412)
• Fixed bug with error handling in closure scheduled tasks (#34420)
• Dont double escape on ComponentTagCompiler.php (12ba0d9)
• Fixed mysqldump: unknown variable 'column-statistics=0 for MariaDB schema dump (#34442)

#v8.5.0

#Added

• Allow clearing an SQS queue by queue:clear command (#34383, de811ea)
• Added Illuminate\Foundation\Auth\EmailVerificationRequest (4bde31b)
• Auto handle Jsonable values passed to castAsJson() (#34392)
• Added crossJoinSub method to the query builder (#34400)
• Added Illuminate\Session\Store::passwordConfirmed() (fb3f45a)

#Changed

• check for view existence first in Illuminate\Mail\Markdown::render() (5f78c90)
• Guess the model name when using the make:factory command (#34373)

#v8.4.0

#Added

• Added SQLite schema dump support (#34323)
• Added queue:clear command (#34330, 06b378c)

#Fixed

• Fixed minimal.blade.php (#34379)
• Dont double escape on ComponentTagCompiler.php (ec75487)
• Fixed dots in attribute names in DynamicComponent (2d1d962)

#Changed

• Show warning when view exists when using artisan make:component (#34376, 0ce75e0)
• Call the booting/booted callbacks from the container (#34370)