Laravel retrospective: what changed since version 5.8?

Introduction

You may belong to a group of people who left Laravel a few years ago and would like a quick summary of everything that changed now that you are coming back.

Well, this is your lucky day. Instead of letting you pour hours into reading every upgrade guide, I leveraged the power of AI to compile a (non-exhaustive) list that will give you a great overview.

Changes in the directory structure

Moved directories

In Laravel 9, the resources/lang directory has been moved to the root project directory.

New directories

factories: in Laravel 8, model factories were rewritten to support classes, and they are stored in the database/factories directory.
seeders: still in Laravel 8 , seeder classes are now stored in the database/seeders directory.

Removed or changed functionalities

Authentication scaffolding moved to laravel/ui repository.
The str_ and array_ helpers were removed from the framework in Laravel 6.0 and moved to the laravel/helpers package.
The Input facade was removed in Laravel 6.0, and developers are encouraged to use the Request facade instead.
The mandrill and sparkpost mail drivers were removed in Laravel 6.0.
The rackspace storage driver was removed in Laravel 6.0.
The undocumented addHidden and addVisible methods were removed from Eloquent in Laravel 7.0.
The undocumented promotion Markdown mail component was removed in Laravel 7.0.
Support for duplicate route names was removed in Laravel 7.0.
Factory “types” feature was removed from Eloquent in Laravel 7.0.
The retryAfter method and property were renamed to backoff in Laravel 8.0.
The timeoutAt property was renamed to retryUntil in Laravel 8.0.
The allOnQueue() and allOnConnection() methods were removed when using job chaining in Laravel 8.0.
The default Markdown mail templates were changed in Laravel 7.0 and 8.0, and the old templates were removed.
The password validation rule was renamed to current_password in Laravel 9.0.
The Eloquent model’s $dates property was deprecated in Laravel 10.0, and developers are encouraged to use the $casts property instead.
The Redirect::home method was deprecated in Laravel 10.0, and developers should use Redirect::route('home') instead.
The deprecated Bus::dispatchNow and dispatch_now methods were replaced with Bus::dispatchSync and dispatch_sync methods, respectively, in Laravel 10.0.
The deprecated MocksApplicationServices trait was removed from tests in Laravel 10.0.

More detailed changes since Laravel 5.8 for each major version

Changes in Laravel 6.0 from 5.8

PHP 7.2 or greater is now required.
Carbon 1.x is no longer supported. Upgrade to Carbon 2.0.
str_ and array_ helpers have been moved to the laravel/helpers package and removed from the framework.
Authorization policies should now define a viewAny method, which will be called when a user accesses the controller’s index method.
The default Redis client has changed from predis to phpredis. To keep using predis, set the redis.client configuration option to predis.
The BelongsTo::update method now functions as an ad-hoc update query, meaning it does not provide mass assignment protection or fire Eloquent events.
The Eloquent model’s toArray method will now cast any attributes that implement Illuminate\Contracts\Support\Arrayable to an array.
The route path for verifying emails has changed from /email/verify/{id} to /email/verify/{id}/{hash}.
The Input facade has been removed. Use the Request facade instead.
The between method in the scheduler has updated behavior.
The mandrill and sparkpost mail drivers have been removed.
The rackspace storage driver has been removed.
Passing associative array parameters to the route helper or URL::route method will now attach these values to the query string instead of using them as URI values when generating URLs for routes.

Changes in Laravel 7.0 from 6.x

Symfony 5 and PHP 7.2.5 are now required.
Updated dependencies in composer.json file.
Authentication scaffolding moved to laravel/ui repository.
Added recentlyCreatedToken method to TokenRepositoryInterface.
Renamed Blade::component method to Blade::aliasComponent.
Introduced first-party support for Blade “tag components”.
Removed undocumented addHidden and addVisible methods from Eloquent.
Added booting and booted methods to Eloquent.
Changed date serialization format for toArray and toJson methods on Eloquent models.
Removed “factory types” feature from Eloquent.
Updated getOriginal method to respect casts and mutators.
Removed Zend Diactoros library for generating PSR-7 responses and replaced it with nyholm/psr7.
Changed default Markdown mail templates and removed the undocumented promotion Markdown mail component.
Removed support for duplicate route names.
Integrated Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) support by default.
Made array session driver data persistent for the current request.
Automatically escaped values for assertSee, assertDontSee, assertSeeText, assertDontSeeText, assertSeeInOrder, and assertSeeTextInOrder assertions on the TestResponse class.
Renamed Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\TestResponse class to Illuminate\Testing\TestResponse.
Renamed Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\Assert class to Illuminate\Testing\Assert.
Updated the different validation rule to fail if one of the specified parameters is missing from the request.

Changes in Laravel 8.0 from 7.x

Minimum PHP version is now 7.3.0.
Model factories have been rewritten to support classes.
Seeder and factory namespaces have been added.
The retryAfter method and property have been renamed to backoff.
The timeoutAt property has been renamed to retryUntil.
The allOnQueue() and allOnConnection() methods have been removed when using job chaining.
Paginator now uses the Tailwind CSS framework for default styling.
Automatic controller namespace prefixing is now set to null by default in RouteServiceProvider.
The decodeResponseJson method in the TestResponse class no longer accepts arguments.
The assertExactJson method now requires numeric keys of compared arrays to match and be in the same order. Use assertSimilarJson for comparing without requiring order.

Changes in Laravel 9.0 from 8.x

PHP 8.0.2 is now required.
Updated dependencies in composer.json, including laravel/framework, nunomaduro/collision, and replacing facade/ignition with spatie/laravel-ignition.
Migrated from Flysystem 1.x to 3.x, which may require some application changes.
Replaced SwiftMailer with Symfony Mailer, resulting in several changes related to sending emails.
Laravel’s dependency on opis/closure has been replaced by laravel/serializable-closure.
The password validation rule has been renamed to current_password.
Unvalidated array keys are now excluded from validated data by default.
The resources/lang directory is now located in the root project directory.
The FILESYSTEM_DRIVER environment variable has been renamed to FILESYSTEM_DISK.

Changes in Laravel 10.0 from 9.x

Laravel now requires PHP 8.1.0 or greater and Composer 2.2.0 or greater.
Update several dependencies in composer.json file for Laravel 10 support.
Remove or update the minimum-stability setting in your application’s composer.json file.
Use app()->usePublicPath(__DIR__.'/public') instead of binding path.public into the container for customizing “public path”.
Remove the call to the registerPolicies method from the boot method of your application’s AuthServiceProvider.
Schedule the cache:prune-stale-tags Artisan command for Redis cache tags support.
Update how to retrieve the grammar’s raw string value for database expressions by using the getValue method instead of casting to a string.
Pass a string connection name as the first argument to the Illuminate\Database\QueryException constructor.
Remove the use of the deprecated Eloquent model’s $dates property and use the $casts property instead.
Rename the getBaseQuery method on the Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\Relation class to toBase.
Use the lang:publish Artisan command to publish the language directory in new Laravel applications.
Update your application to work with Monolog 3.x by reviewing Monolog’s upgrade guide and updating any third-party packages.
Replace the deprecated Bus::dispatchNow and dispatch_now methods with Bus::dispatchSync and dispatch_sync methods, respectively.
Optionally, rename the $routeMiddleware property of the App\Http\Kernel class to $middlewareAliases.
Update the return values of the RateLimiter::attempt method.
Remove the deprecated Redirect::home method and use Redirect::route('home') instead.
Remove the deprecated MocksApplicationServices trait from your tests and use fakes instead, such as Event::fake, Bus::fake, and Notification::fake.
Update closure based custom validation rules to handle the new behavior of the $fail callback.