Laravel 13.40, weekly updates and tip

Laravel 13.40

This week brings us to Laravel 13.40. Here are the highlights:

  • Add Schedule::whenTaskRunsLongerThan in #62233
  • Add Queue::whenJobRunsLongerThan in #62141
  • Allow $middleware->replace() to accept an array of replacements in #62230
  • Add $middleware->insertBefore() and $middleware->insertAfter() helper methods in #62261
  • Add a strict flag to InteractsWithData in #62254
  • Add missing PostgreSQL full text languages in #62210

You may review the full branch diff on GitHub for a complete list of changes.

Weekly Journal

More Human Shifts last week. One upgrading from Laravel 7 and another from Laravel 9. Both are now upgraded to Laravel 13 and in production. The second one was looped by an alpha test of the new Shift MCP server. While I babysat it very closely, the Shift MCP guided Claude through Shift's upgrade process from Laravel 9 to Laravel 13. I approved a few prompts along the way, but otherwise completely automated by Shift and Opus 5.5.

As part of the Human Shifts, I also built a Livewire 2.x Shift. These Livewire Shifts are relatively new. I built the Livewire 4.x Shift at WireLive last year. I built the rest as I've needed them. The Laravel 7 app I upgraded was still running Livewire 1, so I finally needed the Livewire 2.x Shift. While most have probably upgraded, I figured why not add it to the catalog.

I also got some feedback on the Lumen to Laravel Converter. So I gave it some love. I've said Lumen is dead for nearly a decade. But seems it's officially true now. With the recent push to upgrade, I think more will need to migrate from Lumen to Laravel to have a supported upgrade path.

I did another review of a Laravel Cloud bill. Again, I showed them ways to cut their bill in half. At this point, I feel pretty strongly the guidelines are repeatable. Later this week I'll break ground on a new Shift to scale this up to the public. I still want to do a few more manually, so if you want your Laravel Cloud bill audited for potential savings, please reach out.

So, this week I'll work on that and try to finalize v1 of the Shift MCP. Hopefully I'll get both in the hands of the Laravel community in the next few weeks.

Weekly Tip

I shared this tip a few releases ago, but have since expanded on it. While reviewing projects during Human Shifts, I always audit their dependencies. It's common to find unused dependencies. But it's also common to find candidates that could be assimilated into the codebase.

These are dependencies that are barely used or simply wrappers for underlying APIs. For example, I removed all the GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab Composer dependencies from Shift's codebase and used Laravel's Http client directly.

Doing so reduces my "supply chain" and gives me direct ownership of the parts I'm actually using.

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