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Laravel in 2025: my guides, fixes, and upgrade paths

Table of contents

A brief history of Laravel

Laravel arrived in 2011 with a simple idea that still holds up today: make common web tasks elegant and predictable. Early versions gave us expressive routing, Blade templating, Eloquent ORM, and migrations. By 2015, when version 5.1 landed with long‑term support, I jumped in headfirst. Laravel changed my life. I dropped WordPress and stopped chasing Ruby on Rails because the framework and its ecosystem felt unmatched.

Through the years the ecosystem grew into a complete platform for modern PHP: first‑party tools for local dev, queues and scheduled jobs, API authentication, admin and observability, plus smooth deployment options. The release cadence matured into regular annual versions, so teams can plan upgrades with confidence. In 2025 the framework keeps doubling down on developer experience, performance, and a cohesive full‑stack story that lets me ship faster with fewer moving parts.

What can you do with Laravel?

Laravel covers the full application lifecycle so I can build and operate production software without glue code. With it, I can:

  • Create customer portals, dashboards, CRMs, and e‑commerce backends using Blade or a server‑driven UI approach.
  • Expose clean REST APIs backed by robust validation, rate limiting, and token‑based auth.
  • Model complex domains with Eloquent, handle relationships and soft deletes, and enforce invariants with form requests and policies.
  • Offload slow work to queues, coordinate scheduled tasks, and broadcast real‑time events to websockets.
  • Orchestrate emails, notifications, and file storage across local disks and cloud providers.
  • Keep performance steady with caching, database transactions, and application metrics.
  • Practice test‑driven development with first‑class testing helpers and a fast feedback loop.
  • Ship to traditional servers or serverless, and manage deployments with simple, repeatable workflows.
  • Even power AI and plugin backends, like a ChatGPT plugin API, using the same tools I use for any API.

Good reads about Laravel

If you are new to the framework, start with my plain‑spoken overview of the concepts in my plain‑English walkthrough of what Laravel is, then browse the official documentation to see the framework’s scope at a glance.

Get your environment ready fast. On a Mac, you can install Laravel on macOS with Composer and PHP and set up PHP instantly with Laravel Herd. When you want an auth scaffold with sessions or tokens, reach for the starter kits and wire up routes confidently using the routing overview in the docs.

Next, master the core building blocks you will touch every day. Get productive at the terminal with get comfortable with Artisan, the command line tool. Validate input consistently by following learn validation the practical way. Evolve your database schema using migrations explained step by step, and protect critical writes with when and how to use database transactions.

Solid data modeling pays off quickly. Refactor transformations with refactor with powerful Collection patterns, query confidently with write expressive where clauses, and retire records safely using apply soft deletes safely. Keep the big picture nearby with the Eloquent ORM guide.

APIs are a first‑class use case. Design endpoints with API design best practices tailored to Laravel and secure them using lock down endpoints with Sanctum tokens. As your test suite grows, lean on testing habits that scale in real projects and deepen your toolbox with the official testing docs.

For the front end, I like to start simple and scale as needed. Style quickly with add Tailwind CSS to your Laravel app, render views cleanly with the Blade templating reference, and go reactive without leaving PHP by exploring build reactive interfaces with Livewire and Volt.

Operations, background work, and visibility are part of the daily workflow. Track application health and hotspots with monitor performance with Laravel Pulse, push heavy work to workers using queue workers and job processing, and automate recurring jobs through task scheduling.

Stay safe and current. Audit your application with hardening your app with security best practices. When a new version drops, read what changed in Laravel 12 and how to upgrade smoothly, then follow the official upgrade guide to plan the steps.

Finally, keep your codebase healthy for the long haul. Adopt habits from 25 habits and patterns I recommend and shape your modules and boundaries with architecture principles for large codebases.

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