Amazing Features and Updates of Laravel 6

Laravel 6 release includes compatibility with Laravel Vapor, improved authorization responses, job middleware, lazy collections, sub-query improvements, semantic versioning, among many other improvements.

Here are some of the new features included in Laravel 6:

Semantic Versioning

The Laravel framework (laravel/framework) package now follows the semantic versioning standard. This makes the framework consistent with the other first-party Laravel packages which already followed this versioning standard. The Laravel release cycle will remain unchanged.

Laravel Vapor Compatibility

Laravel 6.0 provides compatibility with Laravel Vapor, an auto-scaling serverless deployment platform for Laravel. Vapor abstracts the complexity of managing Laravel applications on AWS Lambda, as well as interfacing those applications with SQS queues, databases, Redis clusters, networks, CloudFront CDN, and more.

Improved Exceptions Via Ignition

Laravel 6.0 ships with Ignition, a new open source exception detail page created by Freek Van der Herten and Marcel Pociot. Ignition offers many benefits over previous releases, such as improved Blade error file and line number handling, runnable solutions for common problems, code editing, exception sharing, and an improved UX.

Improved Authorization Responses

In previous releases of Laravel, it was difficult to retrieve and expose custom authorization messages to end users. This made it difficult to explain to end-users exactly why a particular request was denied. In Laravel 6.0, this is now much easier using authorization response messages and the new Gate::inspect method. For example, given the following policy method:

/**
 * Determine if the user can view the given flight.
 *
 * @param  \App\User  $user
 * @param  \App\Flight  $flight
 * @return mixed
 */
public function view(User $user, Flight $flight)
{
    return $this->deny('Explanation of denial.');
}

The authorization policy’s response and message may be easily retrieved using the Gate::inspect method:

$response = Gate::inspect('view', $flight);
if ($response->allowed()) {
    // User is authorized to view the flight...
}
if ($response->denied()) {
    echo $response->message();
}

In addition, these custom messages will automatically be returned to your frontend when using helper methods such as $this->authorize or Gate::authorize from your routes or controllers.

Job Middleware

Job middleware allow you wrap custom logic around the execution of queued jobs, reducing boilerplate in the jobs themselves. For example, in previous releases of Laravel, you may have wrapped the logic of a job’s handle method within a rate-limited responsibilities.

You define middleware by specifying a middleware() method on the job class which returns an array of middleware objects. From the pull request, here’s an example:

public function middleware()
{
     return [new SomeMiddleware];
}

And here’s an example of the middleware class:

class SomeMiddleware
{
    public function handle($command, $next)
    {
        // Do something...
        return $next($command);
    }
}

You can also specify middleware when dispatching a job:

SomeJob::dispatch()->through([new SomeMiddleware]);

Lazy Collections

Lazy collections are a game-changer for working with extensive collections of data, including Eloquent model collections. A new Illuminate\Support\LazyCollection class leverages PHP’s generators to keep memory low while working with large datasets.

For example, imagine your application needs to process a multi-gigabyte log file while taking advantage of Laravel’s collection methods to parse the logs. Instead of reading the entire file into memory at once, lazy collections may be used to keep only a small part of the file in memory at a given time:

use App\LogEntry;
use Illuminate\Support\LazyCollection;
LazyCollection::make(function () {
    $handle = fopen('log.txt', 'r');
    while (($line = fgets($handle)) !== false) {
        yield $line;
    }
})
->chunk(4)
->map(function ($lines) {
    return LogEntry::fromLines($lines);
})
->each(function (LogEntry $logEntry) {
    // Process the log entry...
});

Or, imagine you need to iterate through 10,000 Eloquent models. When using traditional Laravel collections, all 10,000 Eloquent models must be loaded into memory at the same time:

$users = App\User::all()->filter(function ($user) {
    return $user->id > 500;
});

However, beginning in Laravel 6.0, the query builder’s cursor method has been updated to return a LazyCollection instance. This allows you to still only run a single query against the database but also only keep one Eloquent model loaded in memory at a time. In this example, the filter callback is not executed until we actually iterate over each user individually, allowing for a drastic reduction in memory usage:

$users = App\User::cursor()->filter(function ($user) {
    return $user->id > 500;
});
foreach ($users as $user) {
    echo $user->id;
}

Eloquent Subquery Enhancements

Laravel 6.0 introduces several new enhancements and improvements to database subquery support. For example, let’s imagine that we have a table of flight destinations and a table of flights to destinations. The flights table contains an arrived_at column which indicates when the flight arrived at the destination.

Using the new subquery select functionality in Laravel 6.0, we can select all of the destinations and the name of the flight that most recently arrived at that destination using a single query:

return Destination::addSelect(['last_flight' => Flight::select('name')
    ->whereColumn('destination_id', 'destinations.id')
    ->orderBy('arrived_at', 'desc')
    ->limit(1)
])->get();

In addition, we can use new subquery features added to the query builder’s orderBy function to sort all destinations based on when the last flight arrived at that destination. Again, this may be done while executing a single query against the database:

return Destination::orderByDesc(
    Flight::select('arrived_at')
        ->whereColumn('destination_id', 'destinations.id')
        ->orderBy('arrived_at', 'desc')
        ->limit(1)
)->get();

Laravel UI

The frontend scaffolding typically provided with previous releases of Laravel has been extracted into a laravel/ui Composer package. This allows the first-party UI scaffolding to be developed and versioned separately from the primary framework. As a result of this change, no Bootstrap or Vue code is present in default framework scaffolding, and the make:auth command has been extracted from the framework as well.

In order to restore the traditional Vue / Bootstrap scaffolding present in previous releases of Laravel, you may install the laravel/ui package and use the ui Artisan command to install the frontend scaffolding:

composer require laravel/ui
php artisan ui vue --auth