What’s new in Laravel 9?

It’s no secret that Laravel is one our favourite PHP Frameworks for building enterprise-level Apps and digital products. As Laravel 9 is released it brings some welcome updates and new features and improvements.

Laravel 9 now has a minimum PHP v8.0 version, controller route groups, a refreshed default Ignition error page, Laravel Scout database engine, Symfony mailer integration, Flysystem 3.x, Improved Eloquent accessors/mutators, and a load of other features.

This latest release also marks a change in the release cycle so major releases will happen every 12 months. It is worth noting that Laravel 8 will receive bug updates until July 2022 and security fixes until January 2023.

Latest updates include:

  • PHP 8 is the minimum version in Laravel 9
  • New Design for routes:list
  • New test --coverage option displays coverage directly in the terminal
  • Anonymous Stub Migrations are now the default
  • New Query Builder Interface
  • PHP 8 String Functions
  • Moved mailer functionality from SwiftMailer to Symfony Mailer
  • Flysystem 3.x
  • Improved Eloquent Accessors/Mutators
  • Implicit Route Bindings With Enums (PHP 8.1)
  • Controller Route Groups
  • Enum Eloquent Attribute Casting
  • Forced Scoped Bindings
  • Laravel Breeze API & Next.js
  • Laravel Scout Database Engine
  • Full-Text Indexes / Where Clauses
  • Rendering Inline Blade Templates
  • Soketi Echo Server
  • Optional Bootstrap 5 Pagination Views
  • Improved Ignition Exception Page
  • New str() and to_route() helper functions

We’ve already started updating existing Laravel applications so if you need support then please get in touch.