Laravel 12 is now officially released, bringing a fresh set of enhancements while primarily focusing on stability, maintenance, and updating upstream dependencies. This release ensures minimal breaking changes, making the upgrade process smooth for most applications. 🚀
What’s New in Laravel 12?
1. New Starter Kits
One of the biggest highlights of Laravel 12 is the introduction of brand-new starter kits for React, Vue, and Livewire. These starter kits include:
- ShadCN UI components for a modern UI experience.
- Livewire stack with Flux components (including a free version).
- WorkOS AuthKit variants offering:
- Social authentication
- Passkey authentication
- Email-based authentication
- Single Sign-On (SSO) with WorkOS
For developers looking to build applications with streamlined authentication and modern UI components, these starter kits provide an excellent starting point. You can explore the documentation for setup and usage details.
2. Focus on Maintenance & Stability
Laravel 12 is primarily a maintenance-focused release, meaning:
- Upstream dependencies are updated to keep the framework secure and performant.
- Minimal breaking changes make the upgrade process smooth.
- Ongoing feature releases will continue throughout the year without breaking changes.
Since Laravel is widely used in production applications, this approach ensures long-term reliability without disrupting existing projects.
3. PHP 8.2+ Minimum Requirement
Laravel 12 continues to require PHP 8.2 as the minimum version. This aligns with modern PHP improvements and ensures better performance and security.
How to Install Laravel 12
If you’re setting up a new Laravel project, install the latest Laravel installer using Composer:
composer global require laravel/installer
Then, create a new Laravel 12 project:
laravel new projectname
If you're using Laravel Herd, simply update to the latest version to get the new installer.
Upgrading to Laravel 12
For existing applications, the easiest way to upgrade is by using Laravel Shift, a tool that automates the upgrade process. Alternatively, you can follow the official Laravel Upgrade Guide to manually update your project.
Conclusion
Laravel 12 is all about stability, long-term support, and ease of upgrades. With new starter kits for React, Vue, and Livewire, updated dependencies, and continued improvements rolling out over the year, Laravel remains a top choice for modern web application development.
Upgrade today and take advantage of Laravel’s latest enhancements! 🚀
Top comments (3)
The enhancements in the Laravel framework already were in Laravel 11 versions. Which makes changing to the major version for the framework more marketing than anything else.
It feels like the living standard for HTML. Juist skip the semantic versioning, and use build numbers. The biggest breaking change is going from 11 to 12 in the composer file according to the update guide.
Check the end of life of php. 8.2 is on security support until 2027.
There are only a few breaking changes in php 8.3. So it wouldn't be that hard to update to an active supported version.
Making the php version higher would warrant a new major version, because it is the biggest dependency.
I wonder in these AI times do we still need starterkits? Starterkits are a bunch of compromises put together to get started faster. Why not tell an AI to create the starter based on the requirements of the project and have a tailor-made starter
While I think Laravel is a good thing in the PHP community, It starts to feel the environment projects are beginning to take over the framework.
You bring up great points about Laravel’s versioning and its evolving role in the PHP ecosystem. The shift to continuous updates makes major version upgrades feel more incremental, with Laravel 12 primarily aligning with PHP 8.2 for security and performance. AI-driven starter kits could be the future, but community-supported ones still offer a solid, best-practice foundation for many teams.
All starterkits they provide feel more javascript centric than PHP centric.
Nowadays even javascript frameworks like astro and remix are moving away from building the full UI in the browser and focus on progressive enhancement. The last term is something that first popped up not long after ajax was introduced.
The focus with Inertia is on SPA while the javascript community is moving away from it. While I think Inertia does a lot for developer experience, it sustains a dying concept.
I have nothing against utility classes, but Tailwind takes it to the extreme. And then another UI framework on top, all just to generate css? If that isn't over-engineering, I don't know what is.
I think the time it takes to select a starterkit and configure it for a project, is going to take longer than thinking about what you need for a project with a team, making AI spit out code, and checking it. Because it is project based it is possible to go further than any starterkit can.