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Laravel 11: release date and new features

Table of contents:

When will Laravel 11 be released?
How to install Laravel 11?
What’s new in Laravel 11: features and changes
How to contribute your own features and bug fixes to Laravel 11?

Laravel 11: release date and new features

When will Laravel 11 be released?

According to the Support Policy, Laravel 11 is scheduled to be released on February 6th, 2024.

The release of Laravel 11 doesn’t mean you must update all your projects immediately, though.

The framework last had LTS (Long-Term Support) in version 6, but each major version has two years of updates, which should give you enough time to get your codebase in check and upgrade it.

Laravel 10 will receive bug fixes until August 6th, 2024 and security fixes until February 4th, 2025.

Version	PHP	Release	Bug fixes until	Security fixes until
10	8.1	February 14, 2023	August 6th, 2024	February 4th, 2025
11	8.2	Q1 2024	August 5th, 2025	February 3rd, 2026

How to install Laravel 11?

Laravel 11 hasn’t been released. Therefore, you must use the --dev flag on the official Laravel installer, which pulls the main branch from the laravel/laravel repository that always contains the latest code.

laravel new hello-world --dev

Or, if you prefer to use Composer explicitly:

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel hello-world dev-master

What’s new in Laravel 11: features and changes

Laravel 11 drops support for PHP 8.1

When Laravel 11 is released, PHP 8.2 will be established, and PHP 8.3 will also be stable. With support for the last two major versions of PHP, Laravel can move forward and abandon 8.1.

But remember: your Laravel apps don’t need to be updated to the latest and greatest as soon as they’re released.

Especially if you have projects with paid clients or employees who depend on them to do their work.

Those projects need to slowly but surely move forward by doing extensive testing. Don’t rush.

See the pull request on GitHub: [11.x] Drop PHP 8.1 support

PHP 8.2

Laravel 11 introduces a more minimalistic application skeleton

Laravel 11 comes with a slimmer application skeleton. The idea for this is that you should have less boilerplate code to deal with. I couldn’t agree more. Here are the details of this change:

In AuthServiceProvider, the $policies property has been removed, as the framework automatically discovers them.
In EventServiceProvider, the SendEmailVerificationNotification is no longer necessary, as the base EventServiceProvider is registering it. You will also notice that auto-event discovery is now enabled by default.
BroadcastServiceProvider no longer necessary and has been removed. The framework is not automatically loading the routes/channels.php file.
RedirectIfAuthenticated is now simpler thanks to the base one in the framework’s internals.
The Authenticate middleware no longer calls redirectTo() for JSON routes. This removes an unnecessary ternary check.
EncryptCookies, PreventRequestsDuringMaintenance.php, TrimStrings, TrustHosts, TrustProxies, ValidateCsrfToken and ValidateSignature middlewares have been removed from the skeleton.
Custom Artisan commands are now loaded automatically. The console kernel does not need to call the load() method.
The routes/console.php has been removed. Closure-based Artisan commands can be registered in the console kernel.
Some migrations have been consolidated into a single file or just removed.
The AuthorizesRequests and ValidatesRequests traits have been removed from the base controller.
The bootstrap/app.php file has been shrunk to just three lines of code.
The exception handler was removed.

Here’s the original PR for Laravel 10 ([10.x] Slimmer Application Skeleton), which was later moved to Laravel 11. You will find even more information about what was changed.

New feature: Laravel 11 offers a new Dumpable trait (dump() and dd() from your objects)

This pull request introduces a new Dumpable trait in Laravel 11, intended to replace the current dd and dump methods in most of the framework’s classes.

The trait allows Laravel users and package authors to include debugging methods easily within their classes by utilizing this trait.

Here’s a code example showing how it can be used:

<?php
 
namespace App\ValueObjects;
 
use Illuminate\Support\Traits\Dumpable;
use Illuminate\Support\Traits\Conditionable;
 
class Address
{
    use Conditionable, Dumpable;
 
    // ...
}
 
$address = new Address;
 
// Before:
$address->foo()->bar();
 
// After:
$address->foo()->dd()->bar();

See the pull request on GitHub: [11.x] Adds Dumpable concern

New feature: The new and more convenient Model::casts() method goes live Laravel 11

Usually, in Laravel, you declare attribute casting in an Eloquent model like this:

class User extends Model
{
    protected $casts = [
        'email_verified_at' => 'datetime',
    ];
}

With Laravel 11, you can now define your casting through a casts() method in your model, giving you a chance to use static methods from the class doing the casting. This is how it looks:

class User extends Model
{
    protected function casts(): array
    {
        return [
            'foo' => AsCollection::using(FooCollection::class),
        ];
    }
}

Moreover, you can now also specify your casts as an array:

class User extends Model
{
    // Even in the old $casts property!
    protected $casts = [
        'foo' => [AsCollection::class, FooCollection::class],
    ];
 
    protected function casts() : array
    {
        return [
            'foo' => [AsCollection::class, FooCollection::class],
        ];
    }
}

The casts() method is prioritized over the $casts property.

All these changes are non-breaking, meaning they won’t affect your current code if you update to Laravel 11.

See the pull request on GitHub: [11.x] Adds Model::casts() method and named static methods for built-in casters

Laravel 11 release preparation pull requests

Here’s a list of every merged PR I found to prepare the release of Laravel 11:

There are a lot of small details to dig into that I didn’t include in this article for the sake of conciseness.

How to contribute your own features and bug fixes to Laravel 11?

Did you know you can fix the bugs you have encountered or create the next big feature for Laravel 11?

See what’s going on for Laravel 11 on GitHub: https://github.com/laravel/framework/pulls. The Pull Requests will tell you what’s already been done.
Take one of your pain points with the framework and create a solution yourself.
Send the PR over to the laravel/framework repository, collect feedback, improve, and get merged.

One important tip to increase your chances of being merged: add something to the framework that’s a win for developers but not a pain to maintain for Taylor and his team in the long run.

Pull requests on the laravel/framework repository.

This is what’s new in Laravel 11 for now.

There’s more to come until February 2024, though, so stay tuned!