Laravel 8.70 Released

The Laravel team released 8.70 with a route definition can() method, a Js class for JavaScript encoding, a flag to generate a form request class alongside models and controllers, and the latest changes in the v8.x branch:

🔮 Laravel 8.70.0 released today with a handful of cool new features!

🔒 Chain the "can" method onto a route definition: https://t.co/I24pDPKrqB

✅ Enum validation rule (PHP 8.1): https://t.co/iU1W4gxHOq

👾 Js::from method (better than json directive): https://t.co/gqsZNvpUAX

— Taylor Otwell 🪐 (@taylorotwell) November 9, 2021

#Allow "can" Middleware Chaining in the Route Definition

Taylor Otwell contributed a can() method for route definitions as a convenience. The authorization via middleware documentation has an example of using this method:

// Using the middleware method
Route::put('/post/{post}', function (Post $post) {
    // The current user may update the post...
})->middleware('can:update,post');

// Using the new can() method
Route::put('/post/{post}', function (Post $post) {
    // The current user may update the post...
})->can('update', 'post');

Laracasts also has a short video about this feature:

As part of Laravel v8.70, we can now chain a can() method directly off of a Route declaration.

In today's Larabit, I review a quick example of a before and after approach to attaching authorization to your routes.

Watch the full video here: 👇https://t.co/R6dnfZL5cB pic.twitter.com/OJbFBAcdGu

— Laracasts (@laracasts) November 9, 2021

#Encoding Data in JavaScript

@TinaH , Chris Morrell, and various others collaborated on a new Js class used to properly escape JSON within HTML quotes, resulting in a JS object using JSON.parse:

<script>
    var app = {{ Illuminate\Support\Js::from($array) }};
</script>

{{-- The latest Laravel application skeleton includes a JS facade --}}
<script>
    var app = {{ Js::from($array) }};
</script>

If you want to include this in an existing Laravel 8 project, you can add the following to the config/app.php aliases key after you upgrade to Laravel 8.70:

// config/app.php
return [
    'aliases' => [
        // ...
        'Js' => Illuminate\Support\Js::class,
    ],
];

#Requests Flag for make:controller and make:model

Povilas Korop contributed a new --requests (the shorthand version is -R) flag, which creates a FormRequest class and uses it immediately in the generated controller.

This release of Laravel also includes a "--requests" flag when making models via Artisan. This option will create a "Store{Model}Request" and "Update{Model}Request" form request + update the controller to use those requests on their respective methods. 🔥

Thanks @PovilasKorop! pic.twitter.com/idY6TvySKh

— Taylor Otwell 🪐 (@taylorotwell) November 9, 2021

Here's an example command from the pull request:

php artisan make:controller UserController \
  --resource \
  --model=User \
  --requests

#Enforce Implicit Route Model Scoping

Claudio Dekker contributed a scoping feature to tell the framework to scope the second Eloquent model as a child of the previous Eloquent model in the same route, without the need to provide a slug. Taylor Otwell also made some tweaks to the original PR to allow the following syntax:

use App\Models\Post;
use App\Models\Comment;

Route::get('/posts/{post}/comments/{comment}', function (Post $post, Comment $comment) {
    return $comment;
})->scopeBindings();

// or
Route::scopeBindings()->group(function () {
    Route::get('/posts/{post}/comments/{comment}', function (Post $post, Comment $comment) {
        return $comment;
    });
});

Check out Pull Request #39440 for discussion and implementation details. Documentation for this feature is under Routing - Custom Keys and Scoping.

#Release Notes

You can see the complete list of new features and updates below and the diff between 8.69.0 and 8.70.0 on GitHub. The following release notes are directly from the changelog:

#v8.70.0

#Added

• New flag --requests -R to make:controller and make:model Commands (#39120, 8fbfc9f)
• Allows Stringable objects as middleware. (#39439, #39449)
• Introduce Js for encoding data to use in JavaScript (#39389, #39460, bbf47d5)
• Added new lost connection error message for sqlsrv (#39466)
• Allow can method to be chained onto route for quick authorization (#39464)
• Publish provider.stub in stub:publish command (#39491)
• Added Illuminate/Support/NamespacedItemResolver::flushParsedKeys() (#39490)
• Accept enums for insert update and where (#39492)
• Fifo support for queue name suffix (#39497, 12e47bb)

#Changed

• Dont cache ondemand loggers (5afa0f1, bc50a9b)
• Enforce implicit Route Model scoping (#39440)
• Ensure event mutex is always removed (#39498)
• Added missing "flags" to redis zadd options list... (#39538)