Laravel 13.39, weekly updates and tip

Laravel 13.39

This week brings us to Laravel 13.39. Here are the highlights:

  • Add forceCreate and forceCreateQuietly to BelongsToMany in #62136
  • Add duration to JobAttempted event in #62118
  • Add restoreOrCreate() and createOrRestore() to through relations in #62204
  • Add WithoutMigrationEvents attribute in #62201
  • Add size methods to the array rule builder in #62179
  • Add withoutDispatchingAfterResponses to BusFake in #62130
  • Fix N+1 queries on JSON:API resource collection includes in #62152

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

Weekly Journal

After the newsletter last week I had a few readers ask about their Laravel Cloud bill. I showed them both ways to cut their bills in half. At this point, that's been the case for everyone I talked to. I am looking for more to prove out these patterns. If you're interested, just reach out.

Wednesday was all about the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities. It has been a whirlwind since. I, of course, needed to upgrade my own servers. Luckily I have a single infrastructure for Shift. All my other projects are dead or have been converted to static sites. Too that point, everything is behind Cloudflare. Which claimed to have WAF rules blocking the exploits.

Overnight Tuesday I noticed an uptick in Shifts. It almost felt like a release week. In fact, Thursday was almost my highest revenue day ever. It's bittersweet. Shift's growth has slowed this year. I've been pulling levers to just keep revenue flat. But without major Laravel changes and more AI adoption, Shift's value has diminished. So seeing people still reach for Shift, even for this brief moment, reminded me that Shift still has value.

I also had two more Human Shifts. Both were upgrading Laravel 4.2 applications. I completed one on Friday, and the other this morning. There are so many successful, legacy Laravel apps still in the wild. I expect more Human Shifts to come in from this push to upgrade.

Weekly Tip

Stay up-to-date.

That's easy to dismiss coming from the creator of Shift. But coming from governments, it seemed to be heard. So even if you have patched your PHP version, make sure you're running the latest version of Laravel and PHP.

That's a minimum of PHP 8.2 until the end of 2026, and Laravel 12.x until February 2027.

However, I recommend PHP 8.4 to give yourself more runway, and Laravel 13.x as it still receives active development (not just security patches).