A Quick Guide to Upgrading Laravel to Version 9 🚀

Hello everyone 👋,

Today I will be going through how to upgrade your Laravel application to version 9, Laravel 9 was released on the 8th of February 2022. It includes many new features but one that stands out is the fact that the latest release only goes with the minimum version of PHP 8.0 🤯!

Yes, this certainly means if your Laravel application is in Laravel 8 or older version you might need to upgrade your PHP version before upgrading the application.

The following are major updates in L9

Minimum PHP version of 8.0. requirement
Shift from swift mailer to symfony mailer
Upgrade of the file system to file system 3. x
Improved Eloquent Accessors / Mutators
Enum Eloquent Attribute Casting
Implicit Route Bindings With Enums
Forced Scoping Of Route Bindings.
Controller Route Groups. 👌
Laravel Scout Database Engine
Rendering Inline Blade Templates. 👍
Slot Name Shortcut
Checked / Selected Blade Directives 👏
Bootstrap 5 Pagination Views ( Paginator::useBootstrapFive(); )
Improved Validation Of Nested Array Data
Laravel Breeze API & Next.js.
Improved Ignition Exception Page
Improved route: list CLI Output.
Test Coverage Using Artisan test Command
Socket Echo Server
New Helpers.

Above are some of the major updates that are in L9, I won't go over them in this article but I will select some of them and create articles explaining what the exact update is and how it works so stay tuned.

So how do I Upgrade my Laravel Application?

I'll be upgrading my own application to version 9 from version 8 hence this article will be a good explainer so just follow along,

First, let's go over our composer.json file and look for laravel/framework and nunomaduro/collision you can look at mine below

Change `laravel/framework package from ^8.12 to ^9.0

Change nunomaduro/collision from ^5.0 to ^6.1

change facade/ignition to “spatie/laravel-ignition”: “¹.0”

Then run

composer update

After you have finished running the composer update go to the following page and read about some high-impact changes that you need to make https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/upgrade depending on which version you upgrading there will be a few differences in the skeleton framework that you need to make.

Notice this guide is to help you quickly update your application. There may be a few files that need to be updated that have not been listed on this guide. Please do not forget to read the upgrade documentation that is available on the official laravel website.

Before you go… Thanks for reading the article!

Any questions or comments hit me up on

Mail: [email protected]

Twitter: https://twitter.com/epmnzava

Github: https://github.com/dbrax