Laravel 8.37, weekly updates, and 🔥 tip

Laravel 8.37

Two patch releases last week in an effort to resolve some issues with the new Blade compiler regex. Despite my efforts, ultimately everything was reverted back to the original compiler.

This week we lots of fixes and additions. So bump to 8.37.0. Here are the highlights:

  • Fix transaction callbacks after updating the transaction level in #36890
  • Fix maxExceptions option on queued listeners in #36891
  • Fix testing of Blade components that return closures in #36919
  • Fix clone on EloquentBuilder in #36924
  • Allow retrying jobs by queue name in #36898
  • Add anonymous migrations in #36906
  • Add missing method to Session in #36937
  • Handle concurrent asynchronous requests in the HTTP client in #36948
  • Add tinyText data type to Blueprint and to available database grammars in #36949

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

This minor 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 Jess and I continued our work on the Tailwind 2.x upgrade for laravelshift.com. We noticed a few opportunities to improve the automation around colors. Specifically those relating to projects using Tailwind UI - which Shift does.

We'll make those tweaks this week and finalize that upgrade. Upon doing so, I will take the Tailwind Shifts out of beta and end the 50% discount.

Also had a few Human Shifts come in last week. These were very old Laravel applications depending on a handful of abandon packages. Fortunately I have accumulated some internal scripts after all the upgrades I have done which help automate the conversion of a few of these. I plan to finish these Human Shifts up tomorrow.

Over the weekend I had some time to return to the new project for Shift. Jess and I will pair on this during the week to get a beta ready as soon as possible. I'm hoping for mid-May.

I'm keeping the project secret at the moment, but I believe it will allow developers to use the automation Shift has added recently with more ease. To be honest, now that we're building it, it's kind of a no-brainer tool from Shift.

🔥 Tip

In trolling the docs last week I noticed something which was released with Laravel 8. It's the --no-reload option added for the artisan serve command.

Starting with Laravel 8, any environment changes to the .env file are detected and loaded while the artisan serve process is running.

Since you were more than likely using artisan serve during development and potentially making a changes to your environment files, this had been an annoyance in previous versions. Now it's the default behavior.

However, you may not want this behavior in all environments. As noted in the docs, it is helpful when running Laravel Dusk tests in a CI environment.

Unfortunately, this isn't noted anywhere else other than the Upgrade Guide. It was only during my monthly review of this page that I stumbled upon it.

So if you're running Dusk tests, the --no-reload option may save you a few seconds. And when it comes to Dusk, every little bit counts. 🔥