Laravel 12.1, weekly updates, and weekly tip

Laravel 12.1

Today we have our first minor release of Laravel 12. And with it likely no more minor releases for Laravel 11. Here are the highlights for Laravel 12.1.0.

  • Improve query readablility in #54791
  • Make PendingCommand tappable in #54801
  • Fix prefixing schema-qualified tables in #54834
  • Add Context::scope() in #54799
  • Allow Http requests to be recorded without faking in #54850
  • Add getRawSql to QueryException class in #54849
  • Add Arr::partition() in #54859
  • Introduce ContextLogProcessor in #54851

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 week, I mostly focused on the Laravel 12 release - answering support emails, being active on social media, making videos. Things went pretty well. A slow start, but Wednesday I tied with most Shifts run in a day. That was a good feeling given my concerns about "no breaking changes" of Laravel 12.

Towards the end of the week the feedback emails started coming in. Mostly optimizations for the Laravel 12.x Shift. Only one or two bugs. They were pretty obvious and unrelated to core changes. So, fortunately, I don't think many would have encountered them.

I had a Human Shift come in Friday. Even though it was only upgrading a few versions of Laravel, it's a pretty large application with a few custom packages. So hopefully I'll finish that up tomorrow.

I also spent some time getting the test suite passing for laravelshift.com. I had worked a little fast and loose releasing the Laravel 12.x Shift. Pretty straightforward changes around pricing and version numbers, but the build was failing for the last week. Of course Dusk is another story. Oh Dusk...

Tomorrow, I'll continue the Wednesday livestreams creating a new Laravel package. This will hold the various Laravel changes I've worked on in recent livestreams. Most were either closed PRs or not used enough to PR. So I'm going wrap them up in a little Laravel additions package. If nothing else, it'll make it easier to share in my own projects.

Weekly Tip

I feel like I had a good tip the other week. Then I went on a trip and Laravel 12 was released and I forgot it. It'll come back to me.

For today, I'll borrow one that popped up while pairing with JT. He added an active_url validation rule to WP Static. At first, I thought this was a custom validation rule. But he told me it's Laravel's.

This rule ensures a url (domain name) has a valid A or AAAA record using the dns_get_record PHP function. Honestly, I didn't even know the dns_get_record function existed. So this is a two-for-one.

Anyway, we use this on WP Static to not only ensure the site entered is a valid URL, but also an "active" domain.