Laravel 5.6 Release: What's New?

TL;DR: On Wednesday, February 7, 2018, Laravel 5.6, was released to the public. It's a major release to the most popular PHP framework on GitHub as of this writing. Furthermore, Spark 6.0 was also released alongside Laravel 5.6. According to the policy laid down by the Taylor and the core team, major Laravel framework releases are released every six months (February and August). In this article, I'll cover the new features in Laravel 5.6 and several other changes and deprecations.

Laravel is the most popular, open-source PHP framework as of this writing. It is designed for building web applications with an expressive and elegant syntax. With Laravel, application development is fast because it ships with a lot of features out of the box. Without further ado, let's dive right into Laravel 5.6.

What's new in Laravel 5.6?

1. Support For Argon Password Hashing

Argon2, the recommended password hashing algorithm by the Password Hashing Competition, is a modern algorithm for securely hashing passwords. And it comes in two distinct flavors, Argon 2i and Argon 2d. PHP 7.2 recently added support for Argon 2i password hashing. Therefore, Michael Lundbol took the initiative to add support for Argon hashing in Laravel.

Initiative to add Argon Password Hashing

The bcrypt driver is the default driver for password hashing in Laravel. However, Laravel 5.6 now supports argon.

Config file for hashing

Note: Laravel 5.6 ships with a hashing config file as displayed above.

2. Better Support For Dynamic Rate Limiting

One of the beautiful built-in features of Laravel is API Rate Limiting. Before now, Laravel's rate limiting configuration involved specifying a hard-coded number of requests on a group of routes. However, Laravel 5.6 adds icing to the cake by allowing you specify a maximum number of requests based on an authenticated User model attribute.

Route::middleware('auth:api', 'throttle:rate_limit,1')->group(function () {
    Route::get('/users', function () {
        // do something awesome
    });
});

In the code above, the rate_limit parameter is an attribute of the User model in a Laravel 5.6 application.

3. Model Serialization on Steriods

Before now, there was a persistent bug on queued models. When queued models are finally processed, it's without their loaded relationships in place.

In Laravel 5.6, huge improvements have been made to ensure that relationships loaded on queued models are automatically re-loaded when the job is processed by the queue.

4. Improved Logging

There is a new logging config file in Laravel 5.6. In this file, you can set up logging stacks that send log messages to various handlers.

Check out the example below:

'channels' => [
  'stack' => [
      'driver' => 'stack',
      'channels' => ['syslog', 'slack'],
  ],

  'syslog' => [
      'driver' => 'syslog',
      'level' => 'debug',
  ],

  'slack' => [
      'driver' => 'slack',
      'url' => env('LOG_SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL'),
      'username' => 'Laravel Log',
      'emoji' => ':boom:',
      'level' => 'critical',
  ],
],

The stack driver allows you to combine multiple channels, in this case, syslog and slack, into a single log channel as shown above.

Furthermore, with the tap array on a channel's configuration, you can easily customize Monolog for an existing channel like so:

'single' => [
    'driver' => 'single',
    'tap' => [App\Logging\CustomizeFormatter::class],
    'path' => storage_path('logs/laravel.log'),
    'level' => 'debug',
],

Note: Monolog is a library that sends your application logs to files, sockets, inboxes, databases and various web services. It's a comprehensive library with various log handlers.

Check out more information on Logging in Laravel 5.6.

5. Single Server Task Scheduling

Before now, if your app ran on multiple servers and the task scheduler was active on those servers, then your scheduled tasks also executed multiple times. However, in Laravel 5.6, you can now schedule your task to execute on just a single server if your app runs on multiple servers.

" In Laravel 5.6, you can now schedule your task to execute on just a single server if your app runs on multiple servers."

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$schedule->command('launch:flasheavy')
         ->tuesdays()
         ->at('12:00')
         ->onOneServer();

6. Beautiful Error Reporting With Collision

Collision is an awesome package developed and maintained by Nuno Maduro. It is a detailed, beautiful and intuitive error handler for console/command-line PHP applications.

Laravel 5.6 now ships with Collision via the dev composer dependency. When working with your Laravel app via the command line, Collision provides an awesome error reporting interface like so:

Collision Integration with Laravel 5.6

7. Elevated Eloquent Date Formatting

Laravel 5.6 provides a subtle way to cast Eloquent date model attributes to a specific date format. All you need to do is to specify the desired date format in the $casts array.

"Laravel 5.6 provides a subtle way to cast Eloquent date model attributes to a specific date format."

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Now, you can customize the date model attributes like so:

protected $casts = [
  'date_enrolled' => 'date:Y-m-d',
  'date_evicted' => 'datetime:Y-m-d H:00',
];

When the model is cast to JSON or array output, the attributes will be formatted to the date formats example provided above like so:

date_enrolled: 2005-02-19
date_evicted: 2018-02-20 8:30

8. Aliasing Blade Components For Easier Access

This feature is very handy. Accessing a blade component in a sub-directory is easier via aliasing. With the component method, you can alias components.card to card assuming the card component's directory is resources/views/components/card.blade.php.

Blade::component('components.card', 'card');

Once it has been aliased, you can invoke the component like so:

@card
  This is your Valentine card.
@card

9. Broadcasting Channel Classes

In Laravel 5.6, you can now generate broadcasting channel classes via the make:channel Artisan command. The generated channel class will be placed in the App/Broadcasting directory.

php artisan make:channel PurchaseChannel

Registering the channel is as easy as calling the Broadcast::channel method below in the routes/channel.php file:

use App\Broadcasting\PurchaseChannel;

Broadcast::channel('purchase.{purchase}', PurchaseChannel::class);

In the PurchaseChannel class, you can add the authorization logic in the join method. Before now, the authorization logic was placed in the channel authorization Closure.

<?php

namespace App\Broadcasting;

use App\User;
use App\Purchase;

class PurchaseChannel
{

  ....

  /**
   * Authenticate the user's access to the channel.
   *
   * @param  \App\User  $user
   * @param  \App\Purchase $purchase
   * @return array|bool
   */
  public function join(User $user, Purchase $purchase)
  {
      return $user->id === $purchase->user_id;
  }
}

10. Daring Upgrade Of Symfony Components and Bootstrap

All the Symfony components used by Laravel 5.6 have been bumped to the ~4.0 release. Furthermore, all the front-end scaffolding of Laravel 5.6 and Spark 6.0 has been bumped to v4.

I covered all the major additions and deprecations of Bootstrap 4 in this article.

Deprecations and Other Updates

• Generating an API resource controller can now be done by using the --api switch when executing the make:controller command.
• Laravel 5.6 introduced helper methods, Arr::wrap(), classes_uses_recursive(), Str::uuid(), and Str::orderedUuid(), the latter generating a timestamp first UUID that's more easily and efficiently indexed by databases like MySQL.
• PHPUnit, upgraded to v7.
• Laravel Mix, upgraded to v2.
• The deprecated Artisan optimize command has been removed.
• Added support for customizing the mail message building in ResetPassword::toMail().
• Add policies() method to AuthServiceProvider to retrieve all the policies defined by the provider.
• Two new blade directives have been added to the framework, @csrf and @method.
• Support for PostgreSQL comments was added. Furthermore, Laravel 5.6 now has better support for enumeration columns.

Check out other Laravel 5.6 updates here.

Upgrading to Laravel 5.6

Laravel 5.6 requires PHP >= 7.1.3. And the estimated upgrade time from Laravel v5.5 is about ten to thirty minutes.

Check out this comprehensive upgrade guide. However, if you don't want to be bothered about manually configuring and changing files for the upgrade, I recommend using Laravel Shift - A service that provides automated, instant Laravel upgrade services by an army of thorough bots and friendly humans.

Laravel Shift

composer require auth0/login:"~5.0"

php artisan vendor:publish

AUTH0_DOMAIN=kabiyesi.auth0.com
AUTH0_CLIENT_ID=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
AUTH0_CLIENT_SECRET=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
AUTH0_AUDIENCE=http://mylaravelapi.com
AUTH0_CALLBACK_URL=null

// config/app.php
'providers' => array(
    // ...
    \Auth0\Login\LoginServiceProvider::class,
);

// config/app.php
'aliases' => array(
    // ...
    'Auth0' => \Auth0\Login\Facade\Auth0::class,
);

// app/Providers/AppServiceProvider.php
public function register()
{
    $this->app->bind(
      \Auth0\Login\Contract\Auth0UserRepository::class,
      \Auth0\Login\Repository\Auth0UserRepository::class
    );
}

// app/config/auth.php
// ...
'providers' => [
    'users' => [
        'driver' => 'auth0'
    ],
],

// routes/api.php

<?php

use Illuminate\Http\Request;

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| API Routes
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Here is where you can register API routes for your application. These
| routes are loaded by the RouteServiceProvider within a group which
| is assigned the "api" middleware group. Enjoy building your API!
|
*/

Route::get('/public', function (Request $request) {
  return response()->json(["message" => "Hello from a public endpoint! You don't need any token to access this URL..Yaaaay!"]);
});

Route::get('/wakanda', function (Request $request) {
  return response()->json(["message" => "Access token is valid. Welcome to this private endpoint. You need elevated scopes to access Vibranium."]);
})->middleware('auth:api');

curl --request GET \
  --url http://localhost:8000/api/wakanda \
  --header 'authorization: Bearer <ACCESS TOKEN>'

Conclusion

Laravel 5.6 came loaded with new features and significant improvements. Another major release will be out by August and some of the features shipping with the next major release will be unleashed at Laracon 2018. Get your tickets already!

Have you upgraded to Laravel v5.6 yet? What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments section! 😊