Laravel 9.21 Introduces a Fresh Look for Artisan

The Laravel team released 9.21 with a fresh new look for Artisan, two brand-new Artisan commands, and more. Let's take a look at all the goodness in the latest Laravel 9 release:

A fresh new look for Artisan

Nuno Maduro contributed a huge refresh of the artisan CLI. "Nearly all the built-in Artisan commands have been reimagined to deliver a better experience."

Here are a few examples from a fresh install of Laravel 9.21:

If you'd like a deeper dive, check out Laravel: Refreshing Artisan on the Laravel Blog. Also, Pull Request #43065 has the implementation details and dozens of side-by-side comparisons of the old vs new CLI.

Artisan about command

Speaking of Artisan improvements, James Brooks created a brand-new command: about. The about command displays output about the Laravel environment, such as debug mode, PHP version, cache statuses, and more:

Artisan model show command

Jess Archer contributed a new model:show Artisan command that displays helpful information to give you an overview of your model:

It provides data from the database and Eloquent to give you a complete, useful picture of your model in one place. Typically, you'd have to explore the database and the model class to compile this information.

Added a whenCounted method to JsonResource

Steve Bauman contributed a whenCounted method to JSON resources to conditionally include a relation count when the relation is set on the model:

// new PostResource($post->loadCount('comments'));
 
 
class PostResource extends PostResource
{
    public function toArray($request)
    {
        return [
            'id' => $this->id,
            'comments_count' => $this->whenCounted('comments'),
        ];
    }
}

Retrieve input from the request as an enum

@emargareten contributed to retrieving an input as an enum from the request object:

// Before
public function post(Request $request)
{
    $status = StatusEnum::tryFrom($request->input('status'));
 
    // do stuff with status enum...
}
 
// After
public function post(Request $request)
{
    $status = $request->enum('status', StatusEnum::class);
 
    // do stuff with status enum...
}

Release Notes

You can see the complete list of new features and updates below and the diff between 9.20.0 and 9.21.0 on GitHub. The following release notes are directly from the changelog:

v9.21.0

Added

• Added inspiring quote (#43180, #43189)
• Introducing a fresh new look for Artisan (#43065)
• Added whenCounted to JsonResource (#43101)
• Artisan model:show command (#43156)
• Artisan about Command (#43147, 51b5eda, #43225, #43276)
• Adds enum casting to Request (#43239)

Revert

• Revert "Fix default parameter bug in routes" (#43208)
• Revert route change PR (#43255)

Fixed

• Fix transaction attempts counter for sqlsrv (#43176)

Changed

• Make assertDatabaseHas failureDescription more multibyte character friendly (#43181)
• ValidationException summarize only when use strings (#43177)
• Improve mode function in collection (#43240)
• clear Facade resolvedInstances in queue worker resetScope callback (#43215)
• Improves queue:work command (#43252)
• Remove null default attributes names when UPDATED_AT or CREATED_AT is null at Model::replicate (#43279)
• Protect against ambiguous columns (#43278)
• Use readpast query hint instead of holdlock for sqlsrv database queue (#43259)
• Vendor publish flag that restricts to only existing files (#43212)