Upgrade Guide
High Impact Changes
Medium Impact Changes
Upgrading To 8.0 From 7.x
Estimated Upgrade Time: 15 Minutes
{note} We attempt to document every possible breaking change. Since some of these breaking changes are in obscure parts of the framework only a portion of these changes may actually affect your application.
PHP 7.3.0 Required
Likelihood Of Impact: Medium
The new minimum PHP version is now 7.3.0.
Updating Dependencies
Update the following dependencies in your composer.json
file:
guzzlehttp/guzzle
to^7.0.1
facade/ignition
to^2.3.6
laravel/framework
to^8.0
laravel/ui
to^3.0
nunomaduro/collision
to^5.0
phpunit/phpunit
to^9.0
The following first-party packages have new major releases to support Laravel 8. If applicable, you should read their individual upgrade guides before upgrading:
In addition, the Laravel installer has been updated to support composer create-project
and Laravel Jetstream. Any installer older than 4.0 will cease to work after October 2020. You should upgrade your global installer to ^4.0
as soon as possible.
Finally, examine any other third-party packages consumed by your application and verify you are using the proper version for Laravel 8 support.
Collections
The isset
Method
Likelihood Of Impact: Low
To be consistent with typical PHP behavior, the offsetExists
method of Illuminate\Support\Collection
has been updated to use isset
instead of array_key_exists
. This may present a change in behavior when dealing with collection items that have a value of null
:
$collection = collect([null]);
// Laravel 7.x - true
isset($collection[0]);
// Laravel 8.x - false
isset($collection[0]);
Database
Seeder & Factory Namespaces
Likelihood Of Impact: High
Seeders and factories are now namespaced. To accommodate for these changes, add the Database\Seeders
namespace to your seeder classes. In addition, the previous database/seeds
directory should be renamed to database/seeders
:
<?php
namespace Database\Seeders;
use App\Models\User;
use Illuminate\Database\Seeder;
class DatabaseSeeder extends Seeder
{
/**
* Seed the application's database.
*
* @return void
*/
public function run()
{
...
}
}
If you are choosing to use the laravel/legacy-factories
package, no changes to your factory classes are required. However, if you are upgrading your factories, you should add the Database\Factories
namespace to those classes.
Next, in your composer.json
file, remove classmap
block from the autoload
section and add the new namespaced class directory mappings:
"autoload": {
"psr-4": {
"App\\": "app/",
"Database\\Factories\\": "database/factories/",
"Database\\Seeders\\": "database/seeders/"
}
},
Eloquent
Model Factories
Likelihood Of Impact: High
Laravel's model factories feature has been totally rewritten to support classes and is not compatible with Laravel 7.x style factories. However, to ease the upgrade process, a new laravel/legacy-factories
package has been created to continue using your existing factories with Laravel 8.x. You may install this package via Composer:
composer require laravel/legacy-factories
The Castable
Interface
Likelihood Of Impact: Low
The castUsing
method of the Castable
interface has been updated to accept an array of arguments. If you are implementing this interface you should update your implementation accordingly:
public static function castUsing(array $arguments);
Increment / Decrement Events
Likelihood Of Impact: Low
Proper "update" and "save" related model events will now be dispatched when executing the increment
or decrement
methods on Eloquent model instances.
Events
The EventServiceProvider
Class
Likelihood Of Impact: Low
If your App\Providers\EventServiceProvider
class contains a register
function, you should ensure that you call parent::register
at the beginning of this method. Otherwise, your application's events will not be registered.
The Dispatcher
Contract
Likelihood Of Impact: Low
The listen
method of the Illuminate\Contracts\Events\Dispatcher
contract has been updated to make the $listener
property optional. This change was made to support automatic detection of handled event types via reflection. If you are manually implementing this interface, you should update your implementation accordingly:
public function listen($events, $listener = null);
Framework
Maintenance Mode Updates
Likelihood Of Impact: Optional
The maintenance mode feature of Laravel has been improved in Laravel 8.x. Pre-rendering the maintenance mode template is now supported and eliminates the chances of end users encountering errors during maintenance mode. However, to support this, the following lines must be added to your public/index.php
file. These lines should be placed directly under the existing LARAVEL_START
constant definition:
define('LARAVEL_START', microtime(true));
if (file_exists(__DIR__.'/../storage/framework/maintenance.php')) {
require __DIR__.'/../storage/framework/maintenance.php';
}
The php artisan down --message
Option
Likelihood Of Impact: Medium
The --message
option of the php artisan down
command has been removed. As an alternative, consider pre-rendering your maintenance mode views with the message of your choice.
The php artisan serve --no-reload
Option
Likelihood Of Impact: Low
A --no-reload
option has been added to the php artisan serve
command. This will instruct the built-in server to not reload the server when environment file changes are detected. This option is primarily helpful when running Laravel Dusk tests in a CI environment.
Manager $app
Property
Likelihood Of Impact: Low
The previously deprecated $app
property of the Illuminate\Support\Manager
class has been removed. If you were relying on this property, you should use the $container
property instead.
The elixir
Helper
Likelihood Of Impact: Low
The previously deprecated elixir
helper has been removed. Applications still using this method are encouraged to upgrade to Laravel Mix.
The sendNow
Method
Likelihood Of Impact: Low
The previously deprecated sendNow
method has been removed. Instead, please use the send
method.
Pagination
Pagination Defaults
Likelihood Of Impact: High
The paginator now uses the Tailwind CSS framework for its default styling. In order to keep using Bootstrap, you should add the following method call to the boot
method of your application's AppServiceProvider
:
use Illuminate\Pagination\Paginator;
Paginator::useBootstrap();
Queue
The retryAfter
Method
Likelihood Of Impact: High
For consistency with other features of Laravel, the retryAfter
method and retryAfter
property of queued jobs, mailers, notifications, and listeners have been renamed to backoff
. You should update the name of this method / property in the relevant classes in your application.
The timeoutAt
Property
Likelihood Of Impact: High
The timeoutAt
property of queued jobs, notifications, and listeners has been renamed to retryUntil
. You should update the name of this property in the relevant classes in your application.
The allOnQueue()
/ allOnConnection()
Methods
Likelihood Of Impact: High
For consistency with other dispatching methods, the allOnQueue()
and allOnConnection()
methods used with job chaining have been removed. You may use the onQueue()
and onConnection()
methods instead. These methods should be called before calling the dispatch
method:
ProcessPodcast::withChain([
new OptimizePodcast,
new ReleasePodcast
])->onConnection('redis')->onQueue('podcasts')->dispatch();
Note that this change only affects code using the withChain
method. The allOnQueue()
and allOnConnection()
are still available when using the global dispatch()
helper.
Failed Jobs Table Batch Support
Likelihood Of Impact: Optional
If you plan to use the job batching features of Laravel 8.x, your failed_jobs
database table will need to be updated. First, a new uuid
column should be added to your table:
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;
Schema::table('failed_jobs', function (Blueprint $table) {
$table->string('uuid')->after('id')->nullable()->unique();
});
Next, the failed.driver
configuration option within your queue
configuration file should be updated to database-uuids
.
In addition, you may wish to generate UUIDs for your existing failed jobs:
DB::table('failed_jobs')->whereNull('uuid')->cursor()->each(function ($job) {
DB::table('failed_jobs')
->where('id', $job->id)
->update(['uuid' => (string) Illuminate\Support\Str::uuid()]);
});
Routing
Automatic Controller Namespace Prefixing
Likelihood Of Impact: Optional
In previous releases of Laravel, the RouteServiceProvider
class contained a $namespace
property with a value of App\Http\Controllers
. The value of this property was used to automatically prefix controller route declarations and controller route URL generation such as when calling the action
helper.
In Laravel 8, this property is set to null
by default. This allows your controller route declarations to use the standard PHP callable syntax, which provides better support for jumping to the controller class in many IDEs:
use App\Http\Controllers\UserController;
// Using PHP callable syntax...
Route::get('/users', [UserController::class, 'index']);
// Using string syntax...
Route::get('/users', 'App\Http\Controllers\UserController@index');
In most cases, this won't impact applications that are being upgraded because your RouteServiceProvider
will still contain the $namespace
property with its previous value. However, if you upgrade your application by creating a brand new Laravel project, you may encounter this as a breaking change.
If you would like to continue using the original auto-prefixed controller routing, you can simply set the value of the $namespace
property within your RouteServiceProvider
and update the route registrations within the boot
method to use the $namespace
property:
class RouteServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
/**
* The path to the "home" route for your application.
*
* This is used by Laravel authentication to redirect users after login.
*
* @var string
*/
public const HOME = '/home';
/**
* If specified, this namespace is automatically applied to your controller routes.
*
* In addition, it is set as the URL generator's root namespace.
*
* @var string
*/
protected $namespace = 'App\Http\Controllers';
/**
* Define your route model bindings, pattern filters, etc.
*
* @return void
*/
public function boot()
{
$this->configureRateLimiting();
$this->routes(function () {
Route::middleware('web')
->namespace($this->namespace)
->group(base_path('routes/web.php'));
Route::prefix('api')
->middleware('api')
->namespace($this->namespace)
->group(base_path('routes/api.php'));
});
}
/**
* Configure the rate limiters for the application.
*
* @return void
*/
protected function configureRateLimiting()
{
RateLimiter::for('api', function (Request $request) {
return Limit::perMinute(60)->by(optional($request->user())->id ?: $request->ip());
});
}
}
Scheduling
The cron-expression
Library
Likelihood Of Impact: Low
Laravel's dependency on dragonmantank/cron-expression
has been updated from 2.x
to 3.x
. This should not cause any breaking change in your application unless you are interacting with the cron-expression
library directly. If you are interacting with this library directly, please review its change log.
Session
The Session
Contract
Likelihood Of Impact: Low
The Illuminate\Contracts\Session\Session
contract has received a new pull
method. If you are implementing this contract manually, you should update your implementation accordingly:
/**
* Get the value of a given key and then forget it.
*
* @param string $key
* @param mixed $default
* @return mixed
*/
public function pull($key, $default = null);
Testing
The decodeResponseJson
Method
Likelihood Of Impact: Low
The decodeResponseJson
method that belongs to the Illuminate\Testing\TestResponse
class no longer accepts any arguments. Please consider using the json
method instead.
The assertExactJson
Method
Likelihood Of Impact: Medium
The assertExactJson
method now requires numeric keys of compared arrays to match and be in the same order. If you would like to compare JSON against an array without requiring numerically keyed arrays to have the same order, you may use the assertSimilarJson
method instead.
Validation
Database Rule Connections
Likelihood Of Impact: Low
The unique
and exists
rules will now respect the specified connection name (accessed via the model's getConnectionName
method) of Eloquent models when performing queries.
Miscellaneous
We also encourage you to view the changes in the laravel/laravel
GitHub repository. While many of these changes are not required, you may wish to keep these files in sync with your application. Some of these changes will be covered in this upgrade guide, but others, such as changes to configuration files or comments, will not be. You can easily view the changes with the GitHub comparison tool and choose which updates are important to you.