PHP 8.1 Support in Laravel Sail

Laravel added PHP 8.1 support to Laravel Sail earlier this week. While PHP 8.1 is not ready for production yet, you can start developing applications, testing packages, and getting ready for the PHP 8.1 GA release in November.

A special thanks to Dries Vints who contributed this update:

As of with today's Laravel Sail release you can try out PHP 8.1! Update your runtime in your docker-compose.yml file to 8.1 and run "sail build --no-cache" to rebuild the container.

Please note that some PHP 8.1 extensions aren't yet available: https://t.co/oUAjErUL0q

— Dries Vints (@driesvints) October 12, 2021

Updating Your Sail Project to PHP 8.1

If you want to start using PHP 8.1 in your Sail applications now, you can update the project's docker-compose.yml file build.context and image values to 8.1:

services:
    laravel.test:
        build:
            context: ./vendor/laravel/sail/runtimes/8.1
            dockerfile: Dockerfile
            args:
                WWWGROUP: '${WWWGROUP}'
        image: sail-8.1/app
        # ...

If you have an existing application with Sail, you'll need to run composer update to get the latest version of Sail that includes the 8.1 runtime:

composer update laravel/sail

After you're done updating the files, you can rerun Sail to get the latest changes:

./vendor/bin/sail down
./vendor/bin/sail build
./vendor/bin/sail up

With that, you should see something similar to the following on the welcome screen if you're starting a new Laravel application:

Learn More

If you'd like to learn more about the PHP 8.1 sail implementation, check out Pull Request #254 in the laravel/sail repo. I'd also recommend checking out the Installation and Sail documentation for setup and usage details.