Laravel 10.16, weekly updates, and 🔥 tip

Laravel 10.16

No release last week with Laracon US. However, big release this week with a fast-follow patch release bringing us to Laravel 10.16.1.

Here are the highlights from the release. But I recommend watching Taylor's talk for details about Herd, Folio, and Volt, which were also released this week.

  • Improve display of sub-minute tasks for schedule:list in #47720
  • Add getRedisConnection to ThrottleRequestsWithRedis in #47742
  • Add support for BackedEnum to Collection::groupBy in #47823
  • Allow binding IPv6 addresses in development server in #47804
  • Support inline disk for scoped driver in #47776
  • Fix BusFake::assertChained() for a single job in #47832

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

This version bump and update is automated for subscribers to a Shifty Plan. If you don't have one of those, be sure to bump your constraint and run composer update to get the latest features.

Weekly Journal

Last Tuesday I drove down to Nashville and held a private bourbon tasting with some of the Laravel team and "Jeb". I also attended the speaker dinner where I had an interesting conversation with Taylor about the skeleton slimming and future maintenance of Laravel. Pretty much all of the streamlines I wanted were made. Can't wait to automate them in the Laravel 11 Shift.

I also chatted with Nuno and Caleb at Laracon. They both released new versions of their packages which included some automation for upgrades. Honestly, I think this is great. While I had built a Pest Converter as part of my live streams, but punted building a Shift for LiveWire. It's just not something I am that familiar with. In addition, the changeset never seems that large. Same goes for Nova. So I'm glad to see these have some first-party automation.

One of the altruistic goals of Shift is to help keep the community up-to-date. Having an outdated community creates drag. I witnessed this first-hand with WordPress. It's better now, but 10 years ago the community was stuck on old versions of PHP. The core team had been scared to make changes since the number of sites and plug-ins was so massive. Anyway, I hope Shift, in at least a small way, helps keep Laravel and its community fresh.

This week I need to finish the Human Shifts from before Laracon. After which, I hope to return to working on the Shift CLI.

🔥 Tip

I've always been a fan of the ctype_* functions. They provide quick ways to check common types of a value without writing regular expressions. However, I was reminded of a bit of a gotcha the other day - these functions only work with strings.

For example, ctype_digit was returning false when passed the integer 1, as opposed to returning true for the string 1. Part of me feels these functions should cast the argument to a string. Or, given more typing in modern PHP, throw a type error when not passed a string.