Laravel 8.53, weekly updates, and 🔥 tip

Laravel 8.53

Lots of features this week bringing Laravel to 8.53.0.

Here are the highlights:

  • Prevent assertStatus invalid JSON exception in #38192
  • Add immutable date and datetime casts in #38199
  • Add queue:monitor command in #38168
  • Add twiceDailyAt schedule frequency in #38174
  • Added accepted_if validation rule in #38210

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 completed the remaining Human Shifts. Jess and I also fixed a few of the outstanding issues for the Workbench desktop app.

This included a permissions issue on Linux and some edge cases where the excluded_path configuration was not honored by PHP tasks.

The remaining Workbench issues relate to dependency updates. This is actually an issue in the weekly updates for Shift as well. There's an extra layer of complexity when bumping package versions - the PHP version also needs to be considered.

So we're working to track the PHP version required by each package and compare that with PHP version used by the project when bumping constraints. Easy to say, hard to do. Writing this type of code makes me respect tools like Composer even more.

If there's any time left later this week, I plan to give some attention to subscriptions. Notably the ability to set a billing email address and add Composer auth tokens from the UI, instead of an auth.json to your project.

🔥 Tip

The new queue:monitor command this week is a good example of how useful commands can be. In fact, over the years, I have built all sorts of commands for Shift. These make providing day-to-day support much easier.

I namespace these under shift so they're nice and easily listed by artisan:

shift
  shift:add-package                             Begin tracking version information for a package
  shift:bounced                                 Unsubscribe user and flag account
  shift:bump-package                            Run package updater to open PR for latest Laravel version
  shift:cdt                                     Create Docker order for user who already paid
  shift:check-releases                          Checks for new releases of Laravel and runs automation
  shift:cwl                                     Create a Workbench license for user
  shift:dump-command                            Output the executable command to run a Shift
  shift:dump-subscriber                         Output account information for a Shifty Plan, including orders
  shift:dump-user                               Output user account information, optionally including orders
  shift:email-invalid-repos                     Notify Shifty Plan subscribers of invalid repos
  shift:log                                     Output log for Shift
  shift:merge-accounts                          Merge two user accounts into a single account
  shift:opt-out                                 Opt user out of Shift emails
  shift:rdt                                     Reset the token for a Docker Shift
  shift:refresh-token                           Refresh Bitbucket token for Shift
  shift:refund                                  Issue a refund for a Shift
  shift:remove-user                             Remove a user account and associated data
  shift:reset                                   Reset a Shift so it may be rerun
  shift:run                                     Run a Shift by number
  shift:run-automation                          Run automation for a specific tag (ex: v7.19.1)
  shift:sync-repositories                       Dispatch jobs to update version details for subscriber repositories
  shift:track-payment                           Add payment transaction details to an order
  shift:update-packages                         Update tracked package versions
  shift:uwr                                     Upload Workbench release notes for distribution

I also built webhooks for some of these commands which allow me to trigger them remotely from my phone (via SMS). Just one of the ways I provide super snappy support. 🔥