Asset Prefetching Strategies with Vite in Laravel 11.21

The Laravel team released v11.21 this week, which includes asset prefetching strategies for Vite, a convenience method to force-destroy models with soft deletes, testing helper updates, and more.

Eager Asset Prefetching Strategies for Vite

Tim MacDonald contributed the ability to prefetch assets generated by Vite eagerly:

This PR adds the ability for applications to eagerly prefetch JavaScript and CSS chunks generated by Vite. The goal is to reduce the network delay / costs when navigating throughout a SPA front-end.

Applications built with Vite will often use "code splitting". This technique splits the JavaScript (and CSS) into smaller "chunks". When you load any given page, only the chunks required to render that page are loaded which leads to faster load times for applications. For example, when you land on the homepage you do not pay the cost of also downloading and parsing the admin dashboard JavaScript.

To configure prefetching, you could add one of the following methods to the boot() method of a service provider:

// In a service provider `boot()` method:

Vite::useWaterfallPrefetching(concurrency: 10);
Vite::useAggressivePrefetching();
Vite::usePrefetchStrategy('waterfall', ['concurrency' => 1]);

See Pull Request #52462 for usage details, including videos of assets based on the types of prefetching strategies.

Make expectsChoice() Assertion More Intuitive with Associative Arrays

Jess Archer made updates to the expectsChoice() assertion method when passing an associative array:

$this->choice('Choose an option', [
    'one' => 'One',
    'two' => 'Two',
    'three' => 'Three',
]);

When using expectsChoice(), you would need to write the expectation as follows:

// Before
$this->expectsChoice('Choose an option', 'one', [
    'one',
    'two',
    'three',
    'One',
    'Two',
    'Three',
]);

After updating to Laravel 11.21, you can now do the following instead:

// After
$this->expectsChoice('Choose an option', 'one', [
    'one' => 'One',
    'two' => 'Two',
    'three' => 'Three',
]);

See Pull Request #52408 for more details.

Force Destroying a Soft-deleted Model

Jason McCreary contributed a forceDestroy() convenience method to remove a record while using the SoftDeletes trait:

// Before
$comment = Comment::find(1);
$comment->forceDelete();

// After
Comment::forceDestroy(1);

// Destroy multiple records
// Also, `forceDestroy()` returns an int count of destroyed records:
$count = Comment::forceDestroy([1, 2]);

Add countBetween() to AssertableJson

Borys Żmuda contributed a between() method to the AssertableJson class, which asserts that items are either greater than or equal to the minimum, or less than or equal to the maximum value:

$response->assertJson(fn (AssertableJson $json) => $json
    ->countBetween(10, 30)
    ->etc(),
);

Get the Stream Response from Laravel’s HTTP Client

Einar Hansen contributed a resource() method for the HTTP client’s Response class, which allows you to directly obtain a PHP stream resource from the response body:

// Before
use GuzzleHttp\Psr7\StreamWrapper;

$response = Http::get($imageUrl);
Storage::disk('s3')->writeStream(
    'thumbnail.png',
    StreamWrapper::getResource($response->toPsrResponse()->getBody()),
);

// After
$response = Http::get($imageUrl);
Storage::disk('s3')->writeStream('thumbnail.png', $response->resource());

See Pull Request #52412 for more examples and implementation details.

Add withoutHeaders() Test Helper

Milwad Khosravi contributed a withoutHeaders() method to skip headers during a test request. It was already possible to remove headers individually, and this update allows removing an array of headers in one call:

// Before:
$this
    ->withoutHeader('name')
    ->withoutHeader('foo')
    ->from('previous/url');

// After:
$this
    ->withoutHeaders(['name', 'foo'])
    ->from('previous/url');

Release notes

You can see the complete list of new features and updates below and the diff between 11.20.0 and 11.21.0 on GitHub. The following release notes are directly from the changelog: