NativePHP v1 is finally here!

We did it. We finally did it. NativePHP for desktop v1.0.0 is finally here!

I almost don't believe it.

This is a truly awesome milestone. For a project that started as just an idea, to see it reach a stable release and support building powerful apps across all major platforms is just incredible.

NativePHP came to life April 1, 2023 when I shared on Twitter a little note about some early success on a side project that I'd been working on for a few months.

Taylor Otwell said: "Very interested".

Aaron Francis voted: "Yes please".

That was all the encouragement we needed!

Fast-forward two years, and today, it's the best way for Laravel devs to build distributable desktop apps.

Whether it’s internal tooling for their business, consumer-facing apps for their clients, or just cool hobby projects for the sheer delight of it, NativePHP is enabling hundreds of developers to realize their ideas faster than ever.

Unlocking the ability to build native apps with Laravel is opening new doors to every Laravel developer—and even bringing more people into the Laravel ecosystem!

“Until I discovered NativePHP it was all vanilla PHP, JS and CSS. I'll integrate more Laravel functionality as I need to, now that I kind of understand it.”
— Will, learning programming with Laravel by developing a game in NativePHP

#Go get it!

If you’ve already started building apps with an alpha or beta version of NativePHP, you simply need to update the dependency in your composer.json to the v1 release:

"nativephp/electron": "^1.0",

And then run composer update. As long as your app meets the minimum requirements, the upgrade should be smooth.

If you haven’t tried NativePHP yet, simply add the package into a new or existing app via Composer, install it and then run a debug build:

composer require nativephp/electron
php artisan native:install
php artisan native:serve

You should see your Laravel app appear in its own window, ready for you to start building something awesome!

Note that this release of NativePHP has dropped support for Laravel 10 and PHP 8.1 and 8.2, so make sure your apps are up-to-date and ready to work with the latest tooling.

Go tell all your friends: NativePHP is ready for primetime!

But, of course, we're far from finished!
Read the official release announcement for the full details of what’s coming next…