Laravel

Laravel is a free and open-source PHP-based web framework for building web applications.^[3] It was created by Taylor Otwell and intended for the development of web applications following the model–view–controller (MVC) architectural pattern and based on Symfony. Some of the features of Laravel include modular packaging system with a dedicated dependency manager, different ways for accessing relational databases, utilities that aid in application deployment and maintenance, and its orientation toward syntactic sugar.^{[4][5]: 2, 5–9 [6][7]}

Developer(s)	Taylor Otwell
Initial release	June 2011; 13 years ago (2011-06)[1]
Stable release	11.3.1[2]  / 15 October 2024; 13 days ago (15 October 2024)
Repository	github.com/laravel/framework
Written in	PHP
Type	Web framework
License	MIT License
Website	laravel.com

The source code of Laravel is hosted on GitHub and licensed under the terms of MIT License.^[8]

History

Taylor Otwell created Laravel as an attempt to provide a more advanced alternative to the CodeIgniter framework, which did not provide certain features such as built-in support for user authentication and authorization. Laravel's first beta release was made available on June 9, 2011, followed by the Laravel 1 release later in the same month. Laravel 1 included built-in support for authentication, localisation, models, views, sessions, routing and other mechanisms, but lacked support for controllers that prevented it from being a true MVC framework.^[1]

Laravel 2 was released in September 2011, bringing various improvements from the author and community. Major new features included the support for controllers, which made Laravel 2 a fully MVC-compliant framework, built-in support for the inversion of control (IoC) principle, and a templating system called Blade. As a downside, support for third-party packages was removed in Laravel 2.^[1]

Laravel 3 was released in February 2012 with a set of new features including the cmd command-line interface (CLI) named Artisan, built-in support for more database management systems, database migrations as a form of version control for database layouts, support for handling events, and a packaging system called Bundles. An increase of Laravel's userbase and popularity lined up with the release of Laravel 3.^[1]

Laravel 4, codenamed Illuminate, was released in May 2013. It was made as a complete rewrite of the Laravel framework, migrating its layout into a set of separate packages distributed through Composer, which serves as an application-level package manager. Such a layout improved the extensibility of Laravel 4, which was paired with its official regular release schedule spanning six months between minor point releases. Other new features in the Laravel 4 release include database seeding for the initial population of databases, support for message queues, built-in support for sending different types of email, and support for delayed deletion of database records called soft deletion.^{[1][9]: 18–19}

Laravel 5 was released in February 2015 as a result of internal changes that ended up in renumbering the then-future Laravel 4.3 release. New features in the Laravel 5 release include support for scheduling periodically executed tasks through a package called Scheduler, an abstraction layer called Flysystem that allows remote storage to be used in the same way as local file systems, improved handling of package assets through Elixir, and simplified externally handled authentication through the optional Socialite package. Laravel 5 also introduced a new internal directory tree structure for developed applications.^{[5]: 13–14 [10]}

Lumen 5.0 is the initial release of the Lumen framework, a light derivative of Laravel optimized for speed.^[11] This initial release is based on the Laravel 5.x series of PHP components, and following versions reflect the Laravel versions with which it shares common infrastructure.^[12] As of 2022, authors no longer recommend the use of Lumen for gaining these advantages, and promote Laravel Octane instead.^[13]

Laravel 5.1, released in June 2015, was the first release of Laravel to receive long-term support (LTS). New LTS versions were planned for one every two years.^[14]

Laravel 5.3 was released on August 23, 2016. The new features in 5.3 are focused on improving developer speed by adding additional out of the box improvements for common tasks.^[15]

Laravel 5.4 was released on January 24, 2017, with many new features like Laravel Dusk, Laravel Mix, Blade Components and Slots, Markdown Emails, Automatic Facades, Route Improvements, Higher Order Messaging for Collections, and many others.^[16]

Laravel 6 was released on September 3, 2019. It incorporated shift blueprint code generation, semantic versioning, compatibility with Laravel Vapor, improved authorization responses, improved job middleware, lazy collections, and sub-query improvements. The frontend scaffolding was removed from the main package and moved into the laravel/ui package.^[17]

Laravel 7 was released on March 3, 2020, with new features like Laravel Sanctum, Custom Eloquent Casts, Blade Component Tags, Fluent String Operations and Route Model Binding Improvements.^[18]

Laravel 8 was released on September 8, 2020, with new features like Laravel Jetstream, model factory classes, migration squashing, Tailwind CSS for pagination views and other usability improvements.^[19]

Laravel 9 was released on February 8, 2022.^[12]

Laravel 10 was released on February 14, 2023.^[20]

Laravel 11 was released on March 12, 2024. It was announced on the Laravel blog and other social media, it was also discussed in detail at Laracon EU in Amsterdam on 5–6 February.^[21] Along with Laravel 11, a first-party websocket server called Laravel Reverb was released.

Release history

Starting with Laravel 5 and up to Laravel 8, versions designated LTS were supported with bug fixes for 2 years and security fixes for 3 years. Other releases were supported with bug fixes for 6 months and security fixes for 1 year.^[22] As of version 8, major versions are released yearly, and the support timeline was changed to provide every version with 18 months of bugfixes and 2 years of security fixes. For additional libraries, only the latest major release receives bug fixes.^[19]

Version	Release date[23]	Bug Fixes Until	Security Fixes Until	PHP version
Old version, no longer maintained: 1.0	June 2011
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.0	September 2011
Old version, no longer maintained: 3.0	February 22, 2012
Old version, no longer maintained: 3.1	March 27, 2012
Old version, no longer maintained: 3.2	May 22, 2012
Old version, no longer maintained: 4.0	May 28, 2013			≥ 5.3.0
Old version, no longer maintained: 4.1	December 12, 2013			≥ 5.3.0
Old version, no longer maintained: 4.2	June 1, 2014			≥ 5.4.0
Old version, no longer maintained: 5.0	February 4, 2015	August 4, 2015	February 4, 2016	≥ 5.4.0
Old version, no longer maintained: 5.1 LTS	June 9, 2015	June 9, 2017	June 9, 2018	≥ 5.5.9
Old version, no longer maintained: 5.2	December 21, 2015	June 21, 2016	December 21, 2016	≥ 5.5.9
Old version, no longer maintained: 5.3	August 23, 2016	February 23, 2017	August 23, 2017	≥ 5.6.4
Old version, no longer maintained: 5.4	January 24, 2017	July 24, 2017	January 24, 2018	≥ 5.6.4
Old version, no longer maintained: 5.5 LTS	August 30, 2017	August 30, 2019	August 30, 2020	≥ 7.0.0
Old version, no longer maintained: 5.6	February 7, 2018	August 7, 2018	February 7, 2019	≥ 7.1.3
Old version, no longer maintained: 5.7	September 4, 2018	March 4, 2019	September 4, 2019	≥ 7.1.3
Old version, no longer maintained: 5.8	February 26, 2019	August 26, 2019	February 26, 2020	≥ 7.1.3
Old version, no longer maintained: 6 LTS	September 3, 2019	January 25, 2022	September 6, 2022	7.2 – 8.0[24]
Old version, no longer maintained: 7	March 3, 2020[25]	October 6, 2020	March 3, 2021	7.2 – 8.0[19]
Old version, no longer maintained: 8	September 8, 2020	July 26, 2022	January 24, 2023	7.3 – 8.1[26]
Old version, no longer maintained: 9	February 8, 2022[24]	August 8, 2023	February 6, 2024	8.0 – 8.2[24]
Old version, yet still maintained: 10	February 14, 2023	August 6, 2024	February 4, 2025	8.1 – 8.3[20]
Current stable version: 11	March 12, 2024	September 3, 2025	March 12, 2026	≥ 8.2[27]
Future release: 12	Q1 2025	Q3 2026	Q1 2027	≥ 8.2[27]

Legend:	Old version, not maintained	Old version, still maintained	Current stable version	Latest preview version	Future release

Features

Laravel boasts a variety of features that make it a comprehensive framework for web development:

1. Eloquent ORM: Laravel's object-relational mapping (ORM) tool, Eloquent, allows developers to interact with databases using an object-oriented syntax. It supports CRUD operations and provides an active record implementation for working with database models.
2. Routing: Laravel offers a built-in routing mechanism, developers can use to define application routes. This feature includes support for route groups, named routes, and route model binding.
3. Blade Templating Engine: Blade is a first-party templating engine that allows the use of dynamic PHP directives in HTML-based views. It provides features such as template inheritance, sections, and conditional statements, that can be used to create dynamic content.
4. Middleware: Middleware allows filtering of HTTP requests entering the application. It can be used for various tasks such as authentication, logging, and CORS headers management.
5. Queue System: Laravel includes a unified API for different queue backends, such as Beanstalkd, Amazon SQS, and Redis. This system helps in managing tasks like sending emails or processing data in the background which can enhance application performance.
6. Broadcasting: This feature allows real-time data broadcasting using WebSockets. It helps in building real-time applications such as chat apps and notifications.
7. Task Scheduling: The built-in task scheduling feature enables the execution of scheduled tasks within the application. This abstraction can unify the management of cron jobs by allowing them to be defined in the Laravel application itself.
8. Security: Laravel includes several security features out of the box, such as CSRF protection, password hashing, and encryption. It also provides several methods for validating and sanitizing user input.
9. Authentication Scaffolding: Laravel provides built-in authentication scaffolding for handling user registration, login, and password reset processes. This feature streamlines the implementation of user authentication and management in web applications or by using API.

Performance

Laravel includes a number of features to help developers improve performance of their applications.

1. Caching: Laravel provides a driver-based caching system that supports various backends like Memcached, Redis, and file-based caching. Caching can significantly improve the performance of an application by reducing the load on the database or other heavy tasks.
2. Optimization Commands: Laravel includes several Artisan commands to optimize the framework's performance. These commands can be used to cache configuration files, routes, and views, reducing the overhead during runtime.
3. Queue Management: By offloading time-consuming tasks to background queues, queues helps improve the responsiveness of applications. The Laravel queue system supports multiple queue backends, which aids when scaling the application.
4. Database Optimization: Laravel’s Eloquent ORM includes features like lazy loading, eager loading, and query caching, which help optimize database queries and improve performance.

Testing

Laravel includes a number of other packages to build testing suites with.

1. Unit Testing: Laravel includes PHPUnit and PestPHP, two popular PHP testing frameworks. It also provides various testing tools and assertions to facilitate unit testing of application components.
2. Feature Testing: Laravel allows developers to write feature tests that simulate user interactions and test the application’s behavior from the user's perspective. This ensures that the application works as expected.
3. Mocking: Laravel integrates with Mockery, a mocking library, to allow developers to create mock objects and define expectations for testing dependencies and interactions.
4. Browser Testing: Laravel Dusk provides a headless browser automation and testing API for end-to-end testing. It allows developers to test the entire application in a real browser environment

Security

Laravel includes a number of tools for reoccurring security measures most applications will need.

1. CSRF Protection: Laravel automatically generates and verifies CSRF tokens for form submissions, protecting against cross-site request forgery attacks.
2. Authentication and Authorization: Laravel provides built-in authentication services, including user registration, login, and password reset. It also offers simple and flexible authorization mechanisms to manage user permissions and roles.
3. Encryption: Laravel uses the AES-256 and AES-128 encryption standards to provide secure encryption and decryption of data. The framework includes built-in helpers for encrypting and decrypting strings.
4. Validation: Laravel’s validation system allows developers to validate user inputs and protect against malicious data. It includes a variety of validation rules and supports custom validation logic.

Artisan command line

Laravel's command-line interface (CLI), called Artisan, was initially introduced in Laravel 3 with a limited set of capabilities. Laravel's later migration to a Composer-based architecture allowed Artisan to incorporate different components from the Symfony framework, resulting in the availability of additional Artisan features in Laravel 4.

The features of Artisan are mapped to different subcommands of the Artisan command-line utility, providing functionality that aids in managing and building Laravel-based applications. Common uses of Artisan include managing database migrations and seeding, publishing package assets, and generating boilerplate code for new controllers and migrations; the latter frees the developer from creating proper code skeletons. The functionality and capabilities of Artisan can also be expanded by implementing new custom commands, which, for example, may be used to automate application-specific recurring tasks.

Laracon

Laracon is the official Laravel conference centered around the Laravel framework, covering its development, uses, and related general software development topics. Laracon has taken place in the United States, Europe and online in the past.^[28][29] Typically, the conference happens in the United States and Europe every year. 2017 was the first year a Laracon was held as an online event only. 2018 was the first year a Laracon was held in Australia. Each year the conference has a different variety of sponsors and organizers, but Laravel, Laravel News and UserScape are usually the primary organizers.

While the numerous Laracon conferences are officially run, a number of other conferences are run under the name of Laravel Live. Currently, there are yearly held Laravel Live UK, Laravel Live Denmark and Laravel Live India conferences.^[30][31][32] While these are not officially run, they have the permission of Taylor Otwell to use the name Laravel.

See also

• Computer programming portal
• Free and open-source software portal

• Comparison of web frameworks
• Comparison of web template engines
• October, a content management system built upon Laravel
• Vue.js, a front-end framework that's shipped by default within Laravel

References

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2. "Release 11.3.1". October 15, 2024. Retrieved October 21, 2024.
3. "Laravel Introduction: A PHP Framework for Building High-End Web Applications". www.w3schools.in. Retrieved March 27, 2024.
4. Daniel Gafitescu (June 6, 2013). "Goodbye CodeIgniter, Hello Laravel". sitepoint.com. Archived from the original on November 30, 2020. Retrieved December 21, 2013.
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6. "Laravel Documentation (versions 3.0–3.2.14)". three.laravel.com. Archived from the original on August 26, 2014. Retrieved August 30, 2014.
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9. Raphaël Saunier (January 2014). Getting Started with Laravel 4. Packt. ISBN 978-1783287031. OCLC 868960968.
10. Eric Barnes (January 30, 2015). "Laravel 5". laravel-news.com. Archived from the original on November 11, 2016. Retrieved May 10, 2015.
11. "Introducing Lumen from Laravel". Matt Stauffer. Archived from the original on August 18, 2022. Retrieved July 25, 2022.
12. "Release Notes - Laravel - The PHP Framework For Web Artisans". laravel.com. Archived from the original on February 10, 2022. Retrieved February 12, 2022.
13. Sorgner, Stefan Lorenz (November 4, 2021), "The End as a New Beginning", We Have Always Been Cyborgs, Policy Press, pp. 185–187, doi:10.1332/policypress/9781529219203.003.0005, ISBN 9781529219203, archived from the original on February 19, 2023, retrieved July 25, 2022
14. Eric L. Barnes (June 9, 2015). "Laravel 5.1 is released". laravel-news.com. Archived from the original on May 12, 2016. Retrieved June 14, 2015.
15. Eric L. Barnes (August 23, 2016). "Laravel 5.3 is now released". laravel-news.com. Archived from the original on August 28, 2016. Retrieved August 23, 2016.
16. "Laravel 5.4 Is Now Released". Laravel News. January 24, 2017. Archived from the original on November 25, 2020. Retrieved February 21, 2017.
17. "Laravel 6 release notes". Laravel. Archived from the original on January 30, 2021. Retrieved November 1, 2019.
18. "Release Notes - Laravel - The PHP Framework For Web Artisans". laravel.com. Archived from the original on March 10, 2020. Retrieved March 9, 2020.
19. "Release Notes - Laravel - The PHP Framework For Web Artisans". laravel.com. Archived from the original on July 21, 2021. Retrieved May 9, 2020.
20. "Laravel 10 is released". laravel-news.com. Archived from the original on February 14, 2023. Retrieved February 13, 2023.
21. LARACON EU 2024 // TAYLOR OTWELL :: LARAVEL UPDATE, retrieved March 19, 2024
22. "Laravel Documentation: Releases". Laravel. Archived from the original on November 23, 2020. Retrieved February 26, 2017.
23. "Github Repository Release Notes - Laravel". Laravel. Archived from the original on March 3, 2019. Retrieved November 2, 2019.
24. "Laravel 9 is Now Released". February 8, 2022. Archived from the original on February 17, 2022. Retrieved February 9, 2022.
25. @laravelphp (February 12, 2020). "We are aiming to release Laravel 7.x..." (Tweet) – via Twitter.
26. "Laravel: PHP 8 Support". Laravel. November 26, 2020. Archived from the original on July 23, 2021. Retrieved August 6, 2021.
27. "Laravel - The PHP Framework For Web Artisans". laravel.com. Retrieved March 13, 2024.
28. "Laracon Online | The official worldwide Laravel online conference". laracon.net. Archived from the original on December 16, 2020. Retrieved March 24, 2017.
29. "Search Results". laravel-news.com. Archived from the original on May 29, 2020. Retrieved March 24, 2017.
30. "Laravel Live UK | Home". laravellive.uk. Archived from the original on August 14, 2020. Retrieved August 5, 2020.
31. "Laravel Live Denmark 2024".
32. "Laravel Live India Community". Laravel Live India Community. Archived from the original on August 10, 2020. Retrieved August 5, 2020.

External links

• Official website