Laravel 8.51, weekly updates, and 🔥 tip

Laravel 8.51

A few fixes and some nice developer experience improvements this week. So we get a minor version increase to 8.51.0.

Here are the highlights:

  • Fix passing cursor to pagination methods in #37996 and #38026
  • New @class Blade directive in #38016
  • Accept closure for retry sleep in #38035
  • Allow controller to directly return stdClass in #38033
  • Track and display exceptions on failed status assertions in #38025
  • Display unexpected validation errors when asserting status in #38046
  • Add Filesystem::replaceInFile method in #38069
  • Allow for named arguments via Dispatchable trait in #38066

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 Jess and I continued to work through some of the reported issues for the Workbench desktop app.

There's a few more I want to resolve this week, but I feel the app is getting pretty stable. So hopefully we'll take it out of alpha in the next few weeks.

We also revisited some of the UI/X between the cloud-based and desktop Workbench. Mostly for feature parity, but also to add more "one-click" conveniences.

Two more Human Shifts came in last week. I think the delay in the release may be providing a gap for maintenance. So some teams are taking this "extra time" to prepare.

Working on these upgrades revealed some opportunities to improve the early Shifts as these were both Laravel 4.2 applications.

I hope to add some additional automation later this week as there are a surprising number of applications still running early versions of Laravel.

🔥 Tip

The tip goes back to one of the new features in this week's release - automatically displaying the exception for status code mismatches.

It's one of those things you handled yourself by adding withoutExceptionHandling and rerunning your test. But now seeing this change you realize how much of an annoyance that was.

So if you are writing test (which hopefully you are) and running Laravel 8.x (which hopefully you are), be sure to run composer update so you have this developer experience improvement.

<pitch>Of course if not, use Shift to upgrade or watch Confident Laravel to start adding tests to your application.</pitch>