I've hand-picked some of the biggest stories at Laravel News in 2023. This year was jam-packed with content, conferences, packages, tutorials, videos, and podcasts. We've seen some fantastic Laravel packages enter the ecosystem in Prompts, Pulse, Livewire v3, and more!
Let's take a look at the highlights of each month in 2023:
January: Inertia.js v1.0
In January, we saw the Release of Inertia v1.0, which included a simplified project structure, first-class Typescript support for React and Vue, SSR support for Svelte, SSR server in the core library, and more.
February: Laravel 10
February was arguably the hottest month for Laravel in 2023, with the major Laravel 10 release on February 14th, 2023!
Laravel 10 included some excellent additions to the framework, including:
- Native type declarations in the Laravel 10 skeleton
- The Process component for running CLI commands
- Laravel Pennant
- Invokable validation rules become the default
- Test profiling
- New String password helper
- and more...
Runners up:
March: Pest 2 Release
In March, we saw the release of PEST 2.0, a testing framework that focuses on simplicity. This release introduced Architecture Testing and a bunch of helpful features:
- Speed improvements using the
--paralleltesting flag - The
--profileoption to identify slow tests and optimize their execution - A minimal printer for test output with the
--compactoption - A
--dirtyoption to run only failed tests - A
--bailoption to terminate the test suite on an error or failure - and more...
Runner up: Valet 4.0 is released
April: Laravel 10 Releases
April had some stand-out Laravel 10.x releases, with Laravel 10.7, Laravel 10.8, and Laravel 10.9.
Laravel 10.7 introduced the pipe() method to the new Process layer, which allows you to do something like the following:
$pipe = Process::pipe(function ($pipe) { $pipe->command('cat test.txt'), $pipe->command('grep -i "foo"'),}); $pipe->run()->output(); // "foo"Building in the pipe() method, Laravel 10.8 added some syntactic sugar to the pipe() method:
$result = Process::pipe([ 'cat test.txt', 'grep -i "foo"',]); $result->output(); // "foo"Laravel 10.8 also introduced class-based "after" validation rules, which allows an array of "after" rules, for example:
Validator::make(/* .. */)->after([ new AfterRuleOne(/* ... */), new AfterRuleTwo(/* ... */), function ($validator) use (/* ... */): void => { // ... },});Laravel 10.9 added named static methods for middleware, which provides an alternative "PHPish" way to define route middleware:
Route::get('users', UserController::class) ->middleware([ Authenticate::class, // default. Authenticate::using('web'), // specify a guard. Authenticate::using('web', 'another'), // specify multiple guards. Authorize::using('store', Post::class), EnsureEmailIsVerified::class, // default. EnsureEmailIsVerified::redirectTo('route.name'), ]);Runner up: Laravel Expectations Plugin for Pest
May: Lemon Squeezy for Laravel
In May, Dries Vints introduced his work on the Lemon Squeezy package for Laravel to easily create checkouts and manage subscriptions, trial periods, webhooks, and more. The announcement in May was followed by the release of Lemon Squeezy for Laravel 1.0, but we're counting it for May when the initial package was announced :)
Check it out on GitHub at lmsqueezy/laravel.
Runners up:
June: Laravel Tailwind Merge
The Laravel Tailwind Merge package allows you to merge multiple Tailwind CSS classes and automatically resolves conflicts. This package is a PHP port of the tailwind-merge package for JavaScript.
Runner up: Add Debug Comments to Your Rendered Blade Templates
July: Laracon US 2023
July was the first Laracon since before the 2020 pandemic, and it did not disappoint! We saw Pest's "Spicy Summer" release, Laravel prompts, Laravel Volt and Folio, Laravel Livewire 3, Laravel Herd, Native PHP, Laravel Precognition updates, and a sneak peek of the upcoming Laravel 11 application skeleton.
Our Laracon Recap is an excellent way to summarize everything Laracon US 2023.
Related: Learn Livewire 3, Volt, and Folio by building a podcast player
August: Filament v3
If you thought Laravel might slow down after the outpouring of packages and features from Laracon US 2023, August 2023 proved otherwise. So many things were going on post-Laracon US, but we highlighted Filament v3's launch for August.
We also saw the release of Laravel Prompts in Laravel 10.17, a Class-based API in Laravel Volt, and built-in support for Laravel Pint in PhpStorm.
September: Laravel Pail
We caught our first glimpse of Laravel Pail, the easiest way to tail your log files. Beyond using the tail command, this package provides Laravel-specific features such as filtering logs by exception type, log levels, user ID, and more.
Runner up:
October: Welcome to the Next Version of Laravel News
Eric L. Barnes announced at Laracon US that he was going full-time on Laravel News, and one of the first things he did was rebuild Laravel News with a fresh design. It was completed in October 2023, and I am so happy with this design!
Read more: Welcome to the next version of Laravel News
Runner up:
November: Laracon AU and Laravel Pulse
Laravel Pulse—a health and performance monitoring tool for your Laravel applications—was announced at Laracon Australia 2023 by speaker and Laravel core member Jess Archer. Jess also brought the fantastic Laravel Prompts package and worked with Tim MacDonald and the Laravel team to bring this free, first-party monitoring dashboard to the Laravel ecosystem.
Since its release, developers have been creating Pulse cards for Showing Outdated Composer Dependencies, Database Status, and more. Pulse was officially released in December—see Announcing Laravel Pulse - A New Performance Monitoring Tool for Laravel Apps for more details.
Runner up: Tinkerwell v4 is now released
December: FrankenPHP v1.0 and Octane Release
December 2023's highlight for me was the release of FrankenPHP v1.0 and the subsequent FrankenPHP beta support in Laravel Octane. FrankenPHP shows a lot of promise for delivering Laravel and PHP applications in a single binary file and avoiding the complexity of PHP-FPM deployments.
Honorable mention: Taylor Otwell teased Laravel Reverb in a Tweet—we are looking forward to learning more about Reverb in 2024.
Looking to Laravel in 2024
I think the most significant announcement for 2024 will be the release of Laravel 11. If 2024 is anything like this year, we are in for a real treat. Just when I think the Laravel ecosystem couldn't possibly add more, we get amazing products and features like Pulse, Prompts, Livewire v3, PEST, and more.
We also have a lot of exciting content planned for Laravel News in 2024! Eric L. Barnes has been publishing Videos on our Laravel News YouTube channel, Instagram, and TikTok.
Jacob Bennett and Michael Dyrynda continue to publish regular episodes on the Laravel News Podcast. Lastly, thank you, the Laravel News readers, watchers, and listeners! We appreciate your support!
