Laravel 9: the mindful upgrade guide

Upgrading your Laravel applications to the latest version has many benefits like:

• Reduced bugs;
• Reduced security risks;
• Increased compatibility with first and third-party packages.

Do you really need to upgrade?

Laravel 8 is now dead. It was released in September 8th, 2020 and had:

• Bug fixes until July 26th, 2022
• Security fixes until January 24th, 2023

Upgrade to Laravel 9 if:

• The project is still in active development.
• You need a package that only supports Laravel 9.
• Your project is well-tested, and the transition will be easy.
• You need to keep your users secure. Since Laravel 8 doesn’t get security fixes anymore, you cannot guarantee it.

Do not upgrade to Laravel 9 (even if Laravel 8 is obsolete) if:

• The project didn’t have any new code written for it recently.
• The project doesn’t have users and does not generate revenues.

How to upgrade from Laravel 8 to Laravel 9?

Meet the requirements

• PHP 8.0+ with the following extensions:
  • Ctype
  • cURL
  • DOM
  • Fileinfo
  • Filter
  • Hash
  • Mbstring
  • OpenSSL
  • PCRE
  • PDO
  • Session
  • Tokenizer
  • XML
• Nginx or Apache

As you can see, Laravel 9 doesn’t require anything fancy to work properly.

Make sure third-party Composer packages support Laravel 9

Do the third-party packages you used to build your project support Laravel 9?

To answer this question, go to Packagist, enter the name of the package, and see if it received a recent update. In the list of dependencies, you should see "ìlluminate/something": "^9.0".

Let’s take spatie/laravel-permissions, for instance, which is one of the most popular package for Laravel.

In the screenshot below, we can see it supports Laravel 7, 8, 9, and 10.

If you cannot see any indication that your packages have been updated for Laravel, consider waiting a bit before upgrading your project.

Some people aren’t that patient, though.

Luckily, adding Laravel 9 support for a Composer package is most of the time a matter of changing the illuminate/something version constraints in composer.json, because there aren’t many breaking changes between major updates these days:

{
    "require": {
        …
-        "illuminate/support": "^8.0",
+        "illuminate/support": "^9.0",
        …
    }
}

You could create a Pull Request to help open source maintainers, or fork the package and do the change yourself until the author finds time.

Follow the upgrade guide

There’s no trick in upgrading a Laravel app. It only takes you to follow the instructions in the upgrade guide.

These instructions are usually the following:

1. Make sure your version of PHP meets the minimal requirements.
2. Change the minimum version for a given dependency;
3. Change a line in a given file;
4. A method changed its parameters or return value. Check if you’re using it and make the necessary changes;
5. A previously deprecated class or method has been removed, use something else (the guide always gives you alternatives).

Depending on the size of your codebase, how well-tested it is and even the number of projects you have to upgrade, this can be a time-consuming task.

Fortunately, you will see below how ingenuity can help you upgrade Laravel projects almost automatically and simplify your web developer life.

Laravel Shift: upgrade as many projects to Laravel 9 as you want with a few clicks

If you’re a professional developer, you might have tons of clients who want to be on the latest version of Laravel.

Upgrading can be easy on clean and tested projects, but it can also be a nightmare for others.

This is why a fellow Laravel developer, Jason McCreary, invented Laravel Shift

It’s effortless:

1. Sign in with GitHub, BitBucket, or GitLab
2. Choose a Shift and enter your repository details
3. Receive a Pull Request full of atomic commits for review

Under the hood, Laravel Shift will upgrade your dependencies and make the necessary changes described in the official upgrade guide.

Here are some of the available Shifts (paid and free). You will also see that Laravel Shift can do more than just upgrade Laravel (which already was a considerable feat):

• Migrate from Laravel Mix to Vite (this one is free, so try it!)
• Lint your Laravel project to see if you’re doing things the “Laravel way” (it’s also free)
• Upgrade from Laravel 5.0 up to Laravel 10
• Migrate from Tailwind CSS 0.x up to 3.x
• Migrate from PHPUnit to Pest
• And more!

The pricing is straightforward and extremely generous considering how expensive paying developers is:

• $99 per year to run as many Shifts as you want on your project
• $5-$29 per Shift