A look at what is coming to Laravel 9

Laravel v9 will be the next LTS version of Laravel, and it will be coming out sometime in early 2022. In this post, we wanted to outline all the new features and changes announced so far.

Laravel 9 Release Date Changes.

Laravel v9 was scheduled to be released around September of this year, but the Laravel Team decided to push this release back to January of 2022.

Laravel uses a variety of community-driven packages as well as nine Symfony components for a number of features within the framework. Symfony 6.0 is due for release in November. For that reason, we are choosing to delay the Laravel 9.0 release until January 2022. By delaying the release, we can upgrade our underlying Symfony components to Symfony 6.0 without being forced to wait until September 2022 to perform this upgrade. In addition, this better positions us for future releases as our yearly releases will always take place two months after Symfony's releases.

This will also push future major releases back as well, and here is the schedule going forward:

• Laravel 9: January 2022
• Laravel 10: January 2023
• Laravel 11: January 2024

PHP 8 the minimum version in Laravel 9

Since Laravel 9 will require Symfony 6.0 and it has a minimum requirement of PHP 8 that means Laravel 9 will carry this same restriction.

Anonymous Stub Migrations

Earlier this year, Laravel 8.37 came out with a new feature called Anonymous Migrations that prevents migration class name collisions.

use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;

return new class extends Migration {

    /**
     * Run the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::table('people', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->string('first_name')->nullable();
        });
    }
};

When Laravel 9 launches, this will be the default when you run php artisan make:migration

New Query Builder Interface

Thanks to Chris Morrell, Laravel 9 will feature a new Query Builder Interface.

For developers who rely on type hints for static analysis, refactoring, or code completion in their IDE, the lack of a shared interface or inheritance between Query\Builder, Eloquent\Builder and Eloquent\Relation can be pretty tricky:

	return Model::query()
      ->whereNotExists(function($query) {
          // $query is a Query\Builder
      })
      ->whereHas('relation', function($query) {
          // $query is an Eloquent\Builder
      })
      ->with('relation', function($query) {
          // $query is an Eloquent\Relation
	});

The server.php file can be removed

A minor feature but you can now remove the server.php file from your project and it will be included inside the framework. This file is only used for php artisan serve.

And More...

Laravel 9 is still a few months away, and more new features and announcements will be coming out. We will be updating this post as those get announced.