Laravel

So, Laracon USA was only a few days ago, if you haven’t had chance to watch it check out Day 1 and Day 2 Talks There were many epic talks, and to be honest, I won’t go over each one. But there was a lot learned, such as how to prompt AI better, and to take note of when you feel the code pushing back, and of course AI itself! That said, let us be wary that using AI doesn’t NECESSARILY mean we learn faster. Also, let’s not forget “Cleverness Is A Loan” - every abstraction you make, makes it more difficult for the next dev who has to go through the code. ...

So, last week I got the glory of attending my second Laravel event, this one being Laravel Live UK. It was cool seeing all the familiar faces of internet folk! there were many interesting talks, most highlighting static analysis and rector, which I’m happy to report at my company we’re ahead of the curve. Talks There were many cool talks, so I won’t go over each one, but I’ll give a d-low of some cool talks. ...

So, I often set the laravel/framework version in composer to 13.x-dev (13.x being the current branch). This means I can quickly test the latest and greatest features without waiting for the official release! You’ll have to run a composer update after making the change, but it’s really useful to check commits that’ve been merged in that you want to verify, or there’s new features you want to play around with before they land in a tagged release. ...

I’ve had a few people message me on Linkedin, of all places?! Asking how to PR to Laravel, or for ideas. There’s no “secret method”, but I’ll outline some great steps to success below. I thought I’d put this out there, as it may not be obvious. The below isn’t a tutorial, so no guarantee it’ll work but is generally what I try to follow: 1. Take some time to read the source code Clone the framework repo, composer install, load it up locally, and genuinely go through it. Even if it’s one class at a time that you’re using. It’s important to understand the classes if you plan on making a change, even if its a small section. ...

If you’ve ever used Dusk, you know the following: It can sometimes be flaky for no reason Even a relatively small test suite takes time, because it uses a real driver in the background The above was a real thing that happened and mainly because of work, I decided to give it a good poke and so the laravel dusk parallel package was born Essentially, all you have to do it require the package, and run a few extra chromedriver instances (sorry, I haven’t tested any other drivers!) ...

I’m fairly sure by this point Taylor Otwell is more than likely fed up with seeing my face, but it was him that said “we must ship!” I’m continuing to commit and push PR’s so– this week covers Laravel v12.49.0 - and as usual there’s some funky additions! This blog post is mainly to go over my additions, as well - I’m not Laravel News! Queue assertPushedTimes Currently, when you want to assert a Job that’s been pushed to the queue a certain amount of times, we do something like: ...

With the release of Laravel v12.45.0 it’s all about enums! Loads of methods now accept enums! A lot of methods now accept enums, which I think is pretty cool. I did however have a helping hand, so I’m a bit biased Persistent Cache Cache Facade Queue Paused / Resumed Events The below all have methods that now accept enums, or all of their methods do! This means we can easily change the enum value without having to slug through tests etc. ...

2025 is almost over, so, it’s time to look back! New role At pretty much the start of 2025 (very late 2024) I started a new role at Fusions PIM, after wanting to focus on code quality and understanding, rather than having to code against a timer and trying to push things out as fast as possible. While at first I was unsure if it was the right move looking back now I’ve learnt a lot. Perhaps not in the literal sense, but more focusing on quality, and thinking… making sure the PR’s I make, and the reviews I leave offer value. ...

⚠️ Note: This feature is only available in Laravel v12.41.1 and above. If you’re running an earlier version, you’ll need to upgrade before being able to apply these changes. I recently discovered our Workers seemed to be hitting the database far too frequently. After digging into the Worker class, I figured out that it was down to the restart and pause polling that happens on each loop. I knew we could override the CacheManager class to change this behavior, but that felt… funky. It wasn’t obvious to developers, and it wasn’t really documented anywhere. So — I thought I’d open a PR, and luckily for me, it was accepted! 🎉 ...

When going through the Laravel Queue documentation, I noticed a section around Queued Relationships and the d-low is that essentially when you’re sending a model to a Job, if your model has relationships loaded, those relationships will also get loaded into the payload of the job. This isn’t always obvious! For example, take the below Job as an example: use App\Models\User; use Illuminate\Bus\Queueable; use Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue; use Illuminate\Foundation\Bus\Dispatchable; use Illuminate\Queue\InteractsWithQueue; use Illuminate\Queue\SerializesModels; class WelcomeEmailJob implements ShouldQueue { use Dispatchable, InteractsWithQueue, Queueable, SerializesModels; public function __construct(public User $user) { } public function handle() { // Some sending logic here... } } Because we’re expecting a User model its seralized, including the relations. ...