Laravel 8.73, weekly updates, and 🔥 deals

Laravel 8.73

Lots of patch releases last week. Some of which included new features which were already merged. So we jump a few minor versions and have a patch this week bringing us to 8.73.2.

Here are the highlights:

  • Allow users to specify options for migrate:fresh when using DatabaseMigration trait in #39637
  • Add support for countables to the Pluralizer in #39641
  • Fix assertSoftDeleted and assertNotSoftDeleted in #39673
  • Implement lazyByIdDesc in #39646
  • Allow passing closure for TTL to Cache::remember() in #39678
  • Add .phar to blocked PHP extensions in #39666
  • Forget and clear a mocked/spied instance of an object in the container in #39713

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 working on the new PHP 8.1 tasks. Jess is taking the lead on these. However, I'm working on the task to convert constructor properties to the new initializers.

I plan to do more live streaming the first week of December. To get back in the swing, I recorded one last week. I demoed building another free task to convert property access within Faker to method calls. Property access was deprecated in version 1.14. I started seeing notices in my test runner output. So it was time to clear that up.

I also finally upgraded to PHP CS Fixer version 3. I'd been putting this off for a while as it required not only changing all of Shift's configuration files, but upgrading the workers and Docker images. I planned on building a Shift to convert a PHP CS Fixer v2 configuration to v3. But it got deprioritized. In the meantime, I did update the gist for Shift's Laravel code style configuration.

If you are still running PHP CS Fixer v2, you will need to upgrade to v3 for Shift to continue honoring your code style. This is mostly a file name change. However, there are a few dozen options which changed. Of course, if I do finish the converter, I will announce it here and on Twitter.

It's Thanksgiving this week in the US. This is my favorite holiday. I'll be roasting a turkey for the first time this year. Between the food comas, I will work to finish the PHP 8.1 tasks so we can launch them next week.

A few Human Shifts also came in. This is pretty common at the end of the year. So those will take up the rest of this week and likely spill over into next week.

🔥 Deals

Lots of deals flying around this week. Here's a quick (and final) reminder of the discounts I'm offering for my courses and Shift.