A look at what’s coming to Laravel 5.3

Laravel 5.3 is now released and available for everyone. Here is a quick look at some of these new features:

Laravel Scout

Laravel Scout is a driver based full-text search for Eloquent. Out of the box, it supports Algolia and because it’s driver based anyone in the community can create their own integration with other full-text search systems.

Scout works by implementing a “Searchable” trait with your existing models. Then it’s just a matter of syncing the data with the search service like this:

php artisan scout:import App\\Post

After that you can search your models with:

Post::search('Alice')->get();

You can even paginate:

Post::search('Alice')->paginate()

And it even includes simple where clauses:

Post::search(‘Alice’)—>where('acount_id', '>', 1)->paginate()

Laravel Mailable

Laravel Mailable is a new Mail class for sending emails in an expressive way:

Mail::to('laravel@example.com')->send(new OrderComplete);

Of course you can use all the other mail features as well:

Mail::to('laravel@example.com')->cc('john@example.com')->queue(new OrderComplete);

Laravel Notifications

Laravel Notifications allow you to make quick updates through services like Slack, SMS, or Email.

Notifications ship with a responsive transactional email template. In your notification class all that is needed to send a message is code like this:

$this->line('Thank you for joining')
    ->action('Button Text', 'http://url.com')
    ->line('If you have any questions please hit reply')
    ->success()

Or if it’s an error:

$this->line('Sorry we had a problem with your order')
    ->action('Button Text', 'http://url.com')
    ->error()

Laravel Passport

Laravel Passport is an optional package that is a full oAuth 2 server ready to go.

You can set your scopes, Vue.js components for token generation, revoking tokens, and more.

Rollback one migration

A new feature added to migrations that allow you to rollback just one migration instead of the whole batch:

php artisan migrate:rollback --step=1

Blade Foreach Loops

Inside Blade foreach loops it now gives you access to a $loop variable. This will allow you to do things like this:

@if($loop->first)
    Do something on the first iteration.
@endif
 
@if($loop->last)
    Do something on the last iteration.
@endif

Eloquent Collections are cleanly serialized and re-pulled by queued jobs:

In 5.3, Eloquent collections are cleanly serialized and re-pulled by queued jobs, just like individual models are! pic.twitter.com/IZ5t118WNT

— Laravel (@laravelphp) May 31, 2016

Jacob Bennett tells us why this matters.

Queue console output changed to show the actual class names:

Cleaning Laravel queue console output so it shows actual class names instead of "CallQueuedHandler" for every job. ???? pic.twitter.com/iYKAhTHaeU

— Taylor Otwell (@taylorotwell) June 1, 2016

Ability to customize simple pagination

Today in Laravel 5.3 development. Bringing back simple pagination customization via views. ???? pic.twitter.com/Ir28svVGCA

— Taylor Otwell (@taylorotwell) June 1, 2016

First Or Create

Now firstOrCreate allows additional values to be passed to it. Example:

return User::firstOrCreate(['github_id', $githubUser->id], ['avatar' => $githubUser->avatar]);

Query Builder will now return a Collection

Query builder previously always returned arrays and now it’s going to change to return a collection. This will keep results the same no matter how you pull out the data out:

$collection = DB::table('posts')->get();

Multiple Migration Paths

Now you can load your own migration paths from a service provider:

$this->loadMigrationsFrom('path/to/migrations/folder')

For more on, Alex Bowers has an overview.

Laravel Echo

Laravel Echo is a new feature designed to be an improvement over the current event broadcasting system. See the Laracasts video for more information.

New Cache Helper

The cache() global helper can perform three primary functions: get, put, or return an instance of the backing service. For more details checkout Matt Stauffer’s write up.

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The list only covers some of the big changes, but Laravel 5.3 is shaping up to be a nice release and will be officially announced at Laracon. Be sure and join the Laravel newsletter to get notified as soon as 5.3 is officially released.