Laravel 9.3, weekly updates, and 🔥 tip

Laravel 9.3

Couple fixes and a few new features in this week's release of Laravel 9.3. Here are the highlights:

  • Pass listener arguments to Job middleware methods in #41209
  • Unset connection resolver extended callback in #41216
  • Add NotificationFake::assertNothingSentTo in #41232
  • Add whereNot() to query builder (for closures only) in #41096
  • Support index and position placeholders in array validation messages in #41123
  • Add option to route:list to filter third-party routes in #41254

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 was more of the same. I made more improvements to the Laravel 9.x Shift. I finished up a few more Human Shifts. I also live streamed updating laravelshift.com using Shift.

I like to wait a little bit before upgrading Laravel Shift. Mainly because I'm nervous since it's my primary source of income. But also because it uses more packages. So I like give some extra time for packages to be compatible and fix any bugs.

To that point, I had some issues with graham-campbell/markdown. While it did have a branch which supported Laravel 9, the changelog and README were not fully updated. So I kind of upgraded it blindly. I ran into an issue with one of its facade methods and an outdated config file (effing config files).

Fortunately it only broke the cloud-based Workbench. And, since I launched on Saturday, there weren't a lot of users affected.

This week I'm hitting the ground running developing new tasks and squashing bugs for the Workbench. Aside from any Human Shifts which come in, this will be my primary focus for March.

🔥 Tip

For a little backstory on the Workbench, it actually grew from the Laravel Fixer - which is a set of automated tasks to modernize and refactor your code to follow the latest Laravel conventions.

Over the years more and more of these tasks have been added to the individual Shifts. There are also some internal tasks I use during Human Shifts which didn't have a public form.

A few years back, Jess and I combined these into the Workbench. It now has over 60 tasks for automating changes to Laravel, as well as PHP.

The nice thing about the Workbench is you can run individual tasks or a set of tasks to effectively create your own Shift. Most of these tasks are free. And you can run them in the cloud or locally via our desktop app.