Laravel 12 Update Highlights
People are talking about the decreasing popularity of PHP, but Laravel, a PHP framework, continues to enhance the development process, making it easier and faster to build applications with new features rolled out regularly. The release of Laravel 12.x yesterday brought several improvements that make building, deploying, and monitoring applications even simpler.
While there are numerous changes in Laravel 12, here are some of the main updates:
Starter Kits:
Previously Laravel gave us just the Laravel Breeze and Laravel Jetstream. But Now it provides different starter kits To simplify the process of getting started with Laravel, we’re consolidating that down into one starter kit per stack. At the time of installation, you can choose to start an empty Laravel app or pick your stack: React, Vue, or Livewire.
- React starter kit provides a robust, modern starting point for building Laravel applications with a React frontend using Inertia. The React starter kit utilizes React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind, and the shadcn/ui component library. Frontend and Backend code exists within your application to allow full customization.
- Vue starter kit provides a great starting point for building Laravel applications with a Vue frontend using Inertia. The Vue starter kit utilizes the Vue Composition API, TypeScript, Tailwind, and the shadcn-Vue component library.
- Livewire is another powerful way of building dynamic, reactive, frontend UIs using just PHP. It fits more for the people working with blade templates. Livewire starter kits enhances by utilizing Laravel Volt, Tailwind, and the Flux Ui component library.
Here, to publish additional components npx command helps out to publish new components. There are different layouts, sidebar and authentication page Layouts variants too.
Authentication
All these starter kits use Laravel’s built-in authentication system to offer login, registration, password reset and more but In Laravel 12. It provides a powerful WorkOS Authkit. This offers:
- Social authentication (Google, Microsoft, GitHub, and Apple)
- Passkey authentication
- Email based “Magic Auth”
- SSO
To work with this Authkit you need to have a WorkOS account. WorkOS offers free authentication for applications up to 1 million monthly active users.
To use WorkOS AuthKit as your application’s authentication provider, select the WorkOS option when creating your new starter kit powered application via laravel new.
Managed deployment platforms:
Laravel Cloud is new on Laravel 12 where you can deploy your application within 60 sec. Where you can do it without managing servers.
One-click autoscaling, databases, caching, storage, and security. Laravel Cloud really helps in many perspectives like
- Speed, Simplicity and Scalability without the headaches.
- Easy to create multiple environments for your app, such as staging, production, and development. Each environment can have its own configuration setup.
- Helps to create queue workers to run background tasks, such as sending emails, processing images, or provisioning resources.
- Another thing is it provides enterprise-grade security and performance out of the box.
- And many more things that every developer needed like logs, commands, metrics, command palette.
Streamlined Dependency Injection:
Dependency Injection (DI) is fundamental in building modular, testable applications. Laravel 12 simplifies DI by fully embracing PHP 8’s property promotion, reducing boilerplate code, and making constructor definitions simpler.
Developers often faced repetitive constructor code, especially in larger applications where many dependencies were injected.
The new syntax leverages PHP’s native capabilities, making the code cleaner and improving readability while maintaining the flexibility of traditional DI.
Enhanced Developer Experience
Laravel 12 redefines the developer experience by introducing features like a new scaffolding system, real-time linting, and enhanced error handling. These changes reduce development time and minimize common pitfalls.
Many more updates are there in Laravel 12 for Security Enhancements improved validation, advanced encryption protocols, Enhance API Development, Improved Testing and Debugging Tools, Advanced Eloquent ORM Features, Enhanced Job and Queue Management, Modern DevOps Integration etc.
I will cover the code-wise setup in more detail in another blog. If you’re interested in learning more about Laravel 12, Cloudways has a helpful article that highlights the code changes before and after the upgrade.
