What's new in Laravel Zero 8

Published in Laravel Zero, PHP on Sep 10, 2020

Laravel Zero 8 is the next major release which focuses on some speed improvements and a better developer experience. Check out the website and source code for further details.

Here are the main new features available in version 8 of Laravel Zero.

Laravel core features

As Laravel Zero extends the core Laravel framework, you can utilise new features that were added to version 8.x such as job batching in queues, time manipulation in tests, and more. Check out their documentation to view all the new features.

New GitLab updater strategy

If you store your Laravel Zero application code on GitLab, Fabio Ivona has added a new GitLabStrategy in #407 that supports this. You'll need to change the updater.strategy configuration value to:

LaravelZero\Framework\Components\Updater\Strategy\GitLabStrategy::class

If you haven't published the configuration, you can use the following command:

$ php <application> vendor:publish --provider "LaravelZero\Framework\Components\Updater\Provider"

Git Version Provider fixes

The GitVersionProvider has been updated in #408 by Fabio Ivona to be faster and only use one shell call across all operating systems.

PHP 8 testing

Although Laravel Zero doesn't officially support PHP 8 yet, Abenet Tamiru has updated our framework test suite to also run against PHP 8 in #409. This change will allow us to work on future compatibility with PHP 8 going forward.

Component installer updates

All the component installers have been updated to use the latest versions of their installation dependencies. These new versions are covered in the upgrade guide.

Test suite updated to Pest

For easier developer experience, the tests in Laravel Zero's framework have been rewritten using Pest. These changes are spread across #400 and #403.

Laravel Zero 8 also supports Pest v0.3 out of the box, check out my other quick blog post on adding Pest to Laravel Zero if you want to get started. We have updated the template to use PHPUnit 9.3 by default, which is the latest minor release.

Final remarks

Overall, this release adds some minor but useful improvements to Laravel Zero, and hopefully should make the command line experience better for developers. If you have any ideas or requests, feel free to open an issue on the repository.

Check out the Laravel Zero 8 upgrade guide for full details on updating your application.