Laravel 8.82, weekly updates, and 🔥 tip

Laravel 8.82

Couple fixes and new features in this week's release of Laravel 8.82.

  • Fix autoresolving model name from factory in #40616
  • Fix strtotime Epoch doesn't fit in PHP int in #40690
  • Ability to create cross joined sequences for factories in #40542
  • Add Transliterate shortcut to Str helper in #40681
  • Return collection from ucsplit in #40699
  • Allow push and prepend config values for new keys in #40723
  • Add array_keys validation rule in #40720

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 made some tweaks to the Laravel 9.x Shift. More changes were made in the last few days, so I'll work on automating those later this week.

I also spent some time tweaking and running the old package updater script. This opens a PR for the top 300 packages collected from Shift's Can I upgrade Laravel yet?.

I also stumbled upon an edge case within Shift. Certain tasks which filtered files may have caused Shift to check all files within a project. This likely resulted in false positives listed in some of the comments.

I did notice such comments in some of my own PRs. Yet it was the new testing layer which ultimately revealed this edge case. I know I've mentioned this before, but switching to a more integration style testing layer has not only improved the developer experience, but also identified multiple edge cases.

As such, Jess and I decided to record another miniseries for The BaseCode Podcast. This will go in-depth on this new testing layer. We released the first episode earlier today.

🔥 Tip

In working on the default orderBy feature for Laravel 9, I stumbled upon a few query builder methods.

I knew about the latest and oldest methods. However, I didn't realize they accepted an optional parameter. By default, they sort on created_at. But, you may pass the column to sort on.

So you may use these methods if you find them more human readable than orderBy or orderByDesc. In fact, we may even make this a free task within the Workbench.

The new one I found was reorder, which removes any previously defined orderBy. You may also pass in a new column and direction to order by.

$query = User::latest('login_at');
 
// ...
 
$users = $query->reorder('role', 'desc')
            ->get();