Laravel News Podcast

This is the Laravel News Podcast, your
one-stop podcast to find out about

Laravel-related news, tutorials, packages,
and more. Here are your hosts, Jake

Bennett and Michael Dyrynda.

There it is.

For those of you who happen to be watching
online, Mr. Dyrynda is currently holding

up

a little elephant that is... He's got a
name. Is it Bruno?

Bruce.

Bruce. Bruce the Elephant. If you've never
been to Laravel Australia before,

you may not know who Bruce is. Bruce is
the official mascot of Laravel Australia,

and Michael has recently commissioned an
LED sign

of said Bruce, as well as the upcoming
theme of Laracon AU this year. So, pretty

freaking awesome. If you're not watching
on- online, you should- you should check

it out, 'cause it looks really, really
darn cool. Michael, tell us a little bit

about this thing.

Yeah, I had- I had this... When we- when
we started putting the branding together

for this year, it was... We- we landed on
this notion of Level Up, and it- and it

came together in a really, I think, clever
way, which maybe is a- is a discussion

-for another podcast, but...
-Okay, sure.

When I saw the final version of this Level
Up logo, or this, uh...

-What do they call it? This l- lock up.
-Mm-hmm.

'Cause we've got a couple of different-
we've got a couple of different lock ups

for the Level Up logo, but this particular
one, which is a- which is a square where

Bruce actually jumps up the ladder

of the- of the level.

I thought that's- that'd look really cool
as a sign, and so I- I found a place on

Etsy

that manufactures these LED signs, and I
just got it in- I just got the delivery

yesterday, so. I haven't quite figured out
how to... There's- if- if you're watching

the video, you can see there's, like, a
piece of paper on my wall here that-

-Mm-hmm.
-Which is the template for where I need to

put it on the wall, but I have no idea as
yet how I'm going to mount it, how I'm

going to wire it up. Because each- each of
the 15 pieces of the-

of the logo are individually wired with
LEDs. I've got to figure out how to kind

of connect it all up, uh, and- and get it
on the wall without,

um, damaging the sign, the wall, or
burning my house down. So, wish me luck.

If you've- if you've had any experience
in- in wiring these things up, uh, reach

out to me. If you can help, that'd be
great.

Absolutely. It's gonna look awesome
though. I'm confident.

It definitely seems like a good... All
right. It's gonna look great. Like, just-

just seeing it, just the- the one piece
there. Um, maybe I'll share it on- on

-Twitter. But...
-Absolutely. I said if there's anybody I

know who could do it, it would be Michael
Dorinda.

-We'll figure it out.
-Michael can figure it out.

It definitely feels like a weekend
project, though.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. It's gonna take a little
bit of time. Little bit of time. Well,

episode 241 is what we're on, folks.
Thanks for joining us. July 14th, 2025 is

the date. We've got some releases, some
news, some packages. All sorts of good

tutorials, and they're coming your way
right now. Here we go. Episode 241,

Releases, Laravel version 12.20. So,
Laravel team released this, with the

ability to fail while throttling ...

For a context remember method, the ability
to customize the collection pluck with

the callback, and more. So let's start
with that remember context. Ben Askew

contributed context remember, and remember
hidden functions, which will add the

result of the provided closure to the
context, if not already present, and

always return the result. So before, what
you'd have to do is you'd have to check to

see if context... And context, again, is
something we've talked about on this show

for quite some time. Uh, but context is a
Laravel class that you can now use, that

will maintain the context of the, uh,
request. So you can say, "Add this to the

context," it will persist for the
lifecycle of that request. And so, what

you used to have to do is context has, and
you check to see if a key existed, and

then if it didn't, then you would have...
Sorry, actually, let's- let's take the...

Let's- let's dig in a bit here. If it did
have that, then you'd have to retrieve it.

Otherwise, you'd have to go set it and
then return it, right? And so, that's-

that's kind of what it was. It was- it was
not friendly. And so with this, you can

now say, "Context remember," you can pass
in the key, then you can pass in a

closure, which will either return the
value of that key, or will set it using

the result of that closure. So it's really
much nicer. Thanks, Ben, for writing that

one up.

Balboa codes contribute doesn'tStartWith
and doesn'tEndWith string methods to the

stringable classes, which are the
opposite, of course, of startsWith and

endsWith. You can compare the value
against another string or an array of

strings. It does exactly what it says.
Doesn'tStartWith, doesn'tEndWith, nice and

simple there.

Adding the failWhen method to the
ThrottlesExceptionQueueMiddleware. Michael

Dza Jha... Oh boy, hmm.

-Michael Japeridze.
-Ooh, man. Japeridze. Did you paste that

into, like, some sort of... Nope.

That's a really good one. That's a really
good one. Congra- congratulations.

-It's good.
-Contributed a failWhen method to the

ThrottlesExceptionMiddleware. So
currently, this middleware

only allows for deleting the job when a
specific exception is thrown.

There are occasions where you would want
to mark the job as failed instead. For

instance, in the context of a job chain,
it may be desirable to fail a job when an

exception is thrown so that the chain
stops executing rather than deleting the

job from the chain there. So an example is
given, you have this middleware. Throttle

the exceptions, delete when a-... fail
when, and so you can now do either one of

those, uh, so that's really nice. Pull
request 56180 for details if you need.

Additionally, the q- the queue
documentation also provides more

information on using that throttles
exception middleware, which is really

handy for these jobs.

Uh, Punyabul Sha contributed a new fake
method to the queue facade that allows the

same pattern used by the event facade. So
before, you'd have to queue fake, and

then afterward, you'd have to do some
manual cleanup that was required. Now you

can do queue fake for, and then you can
pass in a closure there. The original

queue is automatically restored once
that's done. So it only fakes for that

particular instance and then, uh, allows
you to do selective job faking there. It

also allows your critical jobs to be
queued normally while you're faking the

others. So, really nice, uh, really nice
addition there.

Adding JSON serializable interface to the
URI class. Uh, Diva Marelis added the

JSON serializable interface to the URI
class to make sure that it's properly

converted to JSON when you're serializing
that.

We've got the fluent class being made
iterable now. So this is, uh, this is

introducing the iter- iterable contract to
the fluent class, which addresses a small

paper cut when using fluent with loops.
So right now, you need to call toarray in

order to iterate over that. Now the
settings property is iterable in Laravel

12.20, so you don't have to do that
toarray before iterating over that

anymore.

The collection method was added to the
config repository. So Kennedy Tedesco

contributed a collection method to return
a collection instance from the config

repository. So now you can say
config.dodop.collection and then pass

in the period-separated or the,

um... This is, this is what's used inside
of Laravel when you're needing to sort of-

Yeah

-... dig into-
-The dot notation

... dot notation. Thank you. That's what I
was searching for. Previously, you would

have to collect the config array. Now you
can just do config collection-

-Mm-hmm
-... and it will grab out a collection for

-you.
-Yeah, I've done that a few times. This is

nice.

-That's super nice.
-These, these paper cuts, these little

things that when you see it, when someone
submits the pull request and adds it to

-the framework, you go, "Yeah, of course."
-Of course.

How have, how have I been living without
this? Because the amount of times that

I've done collect config, you know, in, in
my time, it's, uh,

just if... I don't know. If you ever
repeat these things, just submit a pull

request.

Well, it is great too because, like, if
you're using configs in any sort of way

that's more than just pulling a single
value from the config, there's many, many,

many times where you're gonna need to
pull it into some sort of collection so

you can iterate over and work with those
values or pull a specific piece out by

-name-
-Yeah

... or, uh, or you know, do some sort of
operations on them rather than just

referencing them as static values. So, um,
had to do this a couple times myself, so

this is really nice. Adding closure
support to the collection pluck method.

Ralph J. Smith contributed an update to
the pluck method that allows

customizations to the keys and the values
that are being returned from that pluck.

Sounds, uh... Does just like what it
sounds like. You get that pluck passing a

closure, then you can return, uh, whatever
you like from that. Um, so there you have

that. Context blade directive, Martin
Bean contributed a context blade directive

to determine if a context value exists
inside of a blade file, of course. So

context canonical if it is. So it's like a
conditional set up, so instead of if

context has the word canonical, then do
this. Nope, no longer needed. You just

specify @context in your blade file, and
if the key that you pass in there exists,

the following portion will then render.
Really nice there. Pull request 56146. Of

course, you can see all of the changes and
fixes inside of the release notes for

1219 and 1220 on GitHub.

-There you have it.
-Just a... Just on that context one, does

that also then inject

a value? It does. Very cool.

-So not only does it-
-Hmm. That was nice

... provide you that conditional check, it
will

provide the value of that context
parameter in the value

-variable.
-Yeah.

So the dollar value will be whatever it is
the context get of that key. So that is,

that is smart thinking, Martin. Like that
one.

Very nice.

On to the news. JetBrains PHPverse 2025
happened a few weeks ago

to commemorate, to celebrate the 30th
anniversary or the 30th birthday of PHP,

which brought together core contributors,
framework authors, and passionate

community members for a one day event
packed with insightful talks. From long

time maintainers to new faces in
internals, the event served as both a

reflection on PHP's evolution and a
glimpse of what's coming next. It was

streamed online and peaked at 4,000
simultaneous watchers live from all over

the world, and now all the talks have been
published, so it's the perfect time to

revisit the key moments and catch up with
any of the talks that you might have

missed. So it talks about FrankenPHP,
which is now a official part of the PHP

project. It is, uh, used as like a, a
driver, I think is the, the terminology

for something like Laravel Octane.

Talked about 20 years of Symfony, uh, MCP
in PHP, how AI is changing the tech

industry. There was a Q&A with our very
own Taylor Otwell, the fu- future of PHP

education, growing PHP for the future, and
so on. So we'll have links to all of that

for you in the show notes. There's also
some cool PHPverse swag, and no event, of

course, is complete without awesome swag,
and

the JetBrains team went above and beyond.
Each attendee received a bag filled with

PhpStormStorm shirts and hoodies, a mouse
pad, a, an elephant, uh, a PHP elephant

Lego, and more. Uh, some of the items are
available on the swag store. I had a look

earlier. There is T-shirts. There is a
hoodie. Um, and there are some pins and

stickers as well, so check that out, uh,
if you wanna get involved in any of that

stuff. So, uh, links to all that in the
show notes.

Love the Lego PHP elephant. Pretty
exclusive stuff there.

-Mm-hmm.
-I have a feeling there's gonna be quite a

few people scrambling to get their hands
on that one. Really, really cool stuff.

Thanks so much, JetBrains, for putting
that together. Uh, great, great work on

that.All right. Laravel in 2025. So as
crazy as it sounds,

July 2nd was the midpoint of this year,
which means we're more than halfway

through the year. Yikes. So the team here
at Laravel News thought it'd be nice to

recap some of the most memorable moments
so far at Laravel News. So the following

posts that we're gonna talk about are a
mix of some of our most popular posts,

community milestones, as well as products
and events that have happened. So let's

start with Laravel 12. We used to have
Laracon Online, which is where we would do

some of these bigger announcements, but
then some of these, now that we don't have

Laracon Online, are just taking place on
Bluesky and on X, right? So Laravel 12 was

released on February 2024, uh, of this
year. So, uh, sorry. I said 2024. February

24th of 2025, my apologies. Um, there was
also the new starter kits that were

launched with that, with the first-party
starter kits. The Laravel Installer also

now supports these custom starter kits,
which is really neat. If you have not yet

seen that or read about that, we have that
in a blog post. Uh, you should check this

one out. The custom starter kits are
really, really powerful. It used to be,

um, a lot more difficult to do this, but
now you can install Laravel using these

custom starter kits. It's a great way to
get apps up and running, um, really

quickly using your custom configuration.
Uh, Laravel 12 was also insanely easy to

upgrade compared to previous versions of
Laravel. So it used to be that it was, you

know, quite a few steps you'd have to
take between, uh, versions. Laravel 12 was

by far the easiest. Now I still happened
to use Laravel Shift for all the ones that

we moved from 11 to 12. Just a couple
little pieces and, and parts that are

really nice to just have Laravel Shift to
take care of for you, but by and large, it

was basically a composer.json update and
that was about it. It was really, really

-good.
-Mm-hmm.

It also leverages Inertia 2.0 for the Vue
and React Starter Kits. If you did have

Nova running, you were gonna have to... I-
if it was on a older version, you were

gonna have to upgrade that as well. So
again, that is one other thing to be aware

of, uh, when you're, uh, shifting.

The Laravel Shift will help take care of
for you as well. Uh, but great upgrade

there. The path from 11 to 12 was amazing,
so great job to the Laravel team on that

front. Laravel Cloud was also released in
February along with the Laravel 12

release. This is, of course, a fully
managed infrastructure platform and the

fastest way to deploy and scale your
Laravel applications. Lots of beta testers

helped to contribute to making this what
it is today. And of course, the team has

done an amazing job on making the UI feel
absolutely amazingly buttery smooth. I- I

literally can't

think of a better way to describe it. It
just feels so good to use, and so great

job to the team on that one. Know lots and
lots of time was poured into making that

what it is today, and if you haven't
checked it out, you definitely should.

Native PHP Mobile version 1 launched on
May 2nd, which brings your Laravel app to

the iOS and Android device stores. There's
been, you know, lots of years that we've

been developing web applications that we
can launch onto the web using Laravel.

Amazing. But you can now use that same
language and that same set of things that

you've learned to build apps that you can
bring to the App Store and to the Google

Play Store with Native PHP for Mobile v1.
So huge release on that front, um, and,

uh, really excited to see what people are
building, uh, with this new, um, library.

Okay.

The big one here, Laravel Nightwatch, was
also released. So I, in particular, am

more, was more excited about Nightwatch
than I was about Cloud. I've got a lotta

stuff that I- I already have running
inside of Forge that I've been really

happy with and have not needed necessarily
to switch to Cloud, but Nightwatch is one

of those things that I could add to every
single one of my projects. So it's a

first-party product with deep monitoring
and insights for all of your Laravel

applications, no matter where you deploy
them, and, uh, you can get started by,

like, checking out nightwatch.laravel.com.
Really, really cool. Tailwind version 4

was released. Of course, the community has
been largely behind Tailwind for a long

time. Adam Wathan, long-time Laravel
community member, uh, who created

Tailwind, of course. And so on January
22nd, Tailwind version 4 was released with

a brand new high-performance engine, CSS
First configuration, simplified

installation and more, which we have a
release post that you can read about

there, um, in the blog post here. Of
course, there's plenty more to come this

year. Uh, we've got Laracon US right
around the corner from July 29th to 30th.

Hopefully, we'll see you there. Expected,
uh, to announce some new updates to

Laravel Forge, which I'm really excited
about. Livewire 4 was also mentioned to be

released, uh, hopefully at Laracon US
2025 live from the stage. We've got

Laravel Live Denmark coming up in August.
We've got, uh, Laracon AU, of course,

November 13th to the 14th. Uh, an
opportunity to learn and share and connect

with like-minded people, level up your
skills, knowledge, and Laravel

applications. You can still grab tickets
for that. And then, of course, November

20th of 2025 is when PHP 8.5 launches, so
we're gonna talk about that a little bit

more in the show as well. That is our
first half of the year. Looking forward to

the rest of the year. It's gonna be a
good one.

Yeah. Lots, uh... A lot of big stuff
happened in the, in the front half of this

year, so it's gonna be interesting to see

what the, uh, Laravel team in particular
has been cooking up,

uh, in that time on top of... Obviously,
they're much bigger now, so they have the

capacity to do a lot more things. Um, and,
and as you say, Nightwatch and Cloud

launching in the, in the first half of
this year, not, not small things by any

stretch. So to have the capacity to do
that, to launch that, to maintain that,

and, you know, to look to the future as
well. Taylor's got a two-hour keynote this

-year on the first day, so-
-Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna be crazy.

Uh, looking forward to that. On- on that,
the, the schedule for Laracon US is up now

as well, so if you hadn't seen that, uh,
if you didn't see the email or if you

haven't seen online, check that out. Uh,
there's a lot of cool stuff, interesting

talks on the horizon for that.Another one
that I really enjoyed and immediately, uh,

upgraded was the ability to run Laravel
Pint faster in parallel mode. So it was

recently updated with a new --parallel
flag that makes Pint run 40 times faster

and will fully leverage the parallel
capabilities of phpcs-fixer. You can use

it using /vendor/bin/pint --parallel. The
flag is marked as e- experimental and is

potentially unstable, but to access this
flag, all you need to do is update to the

latest version of Laravel Pint, uh, at
least version 1.23.0.

Along with the --parallel flag, this also
allows extending a Pint configuration from

another file. This is useful if you have
an organization Pint config you share

across projects, however, want to tweak a
few settings on a per project basis.

Um,

yeah. Big- big fan that being able to run
and leverage multiple processes,

especially in things like CI to try and
get those processes to run quicker, you

wanna get feedback in those cycles as
quick as possible, so shout out to Nuno

and the Pint team for that one.

Awesome. Uh, speaking of NativePHP, which
we just mentioned about the first half of

2025, uh, since they launched NativePHP
for mobile in May, they've been building

fast and quiet, running, uh, and refining
the core, creating better tooling,

expanding what was possible with it. So
version 1.1 drops July 14th, which is

today, the date of this recording, and it
isn't just like a collection of fixes.

It's really a foundation upgrade to make
these apps easier to build, faster to

ship, and ready for real production work.
So let's talk about a couple of the things

that have been brought to 1.1. First is
modular

native APIs. Here's what we mean by that.
Previous to this, everything was sort of

stuffed under this system class. We had
system, uh, you know, double parens, and

then you could get to all these mod-
these, uh, native APIs, like biometrics or

camera, dialogues, geolocations, things
like that. No longer do you have to do

that. They all have their own dedicated
facades, so you have biometrics under its

own namespace. Camera, dialogue,
geolocation, haptics, push notifications,

secure storage, and then system. So each
one is designed by itself to be

predictable, documented, and then easy to
expand. So this sets the tone for all

future native features, pulling them into
their own facades so they can be really

focused and testable rather than having
them all crammed under one spot. There

also are a couple new features, secure
storage, geolocation, and gallery picker.

So these are new native capabilities that
you have access to. Secure storage allows

you to store tokens, secrets, and
credentials using that device's native

keychain or keystore, which is incredibly
powerful. Of course, geolocation is a big

one if you ever need accurate location
data, so you can now ask for that in the

permissions support. It's cross-platform
supported, which is excellent,

and then gallery picker is when you allow
users to select media that they want your

app to be able to access. If you've ever
used an application with modern, uh,

privacy focus, you know that it needs to
gain permission to not... You know, it

used to be, "Do you give us access to all
your photos?" And you had to say yes or

no, and now you can be more selective in
which things you want to share. This

gallery picker is essentially that. So
they're now fully integrated into Laravel,

no plugins, no separate workfl- flows,
just these really powerful APIs that you

already understand.

ENV handling was also something that was
annoying. Previously, in Android, if you

ever changed the ENV values, you had to
run PHP artisan native_installforce. This

was a destructive step, so it wiped your
entire project and required you to rerun

that native run. You don't have to do that
anymore. They've now moved all that logic

into native_run。 So when you update that
ENV, it changes the whole thing without

deleting anything. Uh, so fewer surprises,
no wasted time. Uh, same as what it was

in iOS, that's now the same in Android
now. Okay, couple of things that sound

less exciting, but they're actually
allowing you to do some really cool stuff.

Full CLI flag support. So version 1.1
introduces this ability to allow you

to pass those flags to that native_run
function, unlocking true automation. What

do we mean by that? You can now run these
native PHP actions, uh, sorry, these

native PHPs, uh, functions in GitHub
Actions in your deploy scripts or in your

staging pipelines so that you don't have
to have prompts or manual steps built in

there. You just pass the flags, and it
sort of does it silently for you. Really,

really nice.

Also, a undersold feature here, smaller,
faster binaries. So in Android, they went

into their PHP build, and they cut it in
half, essentially, from 16 megs down to 8

megs. Um, in Android with ICU, from 44
megs down to 35 megs, and in iOS, they cut

it in half as well, 55 megabytes down to
22 megabytes. So faster downloads, lighter

binaries, li- lighter bundles, and better
performance. Uh, so really, really good

stuff there. Um, there are a couple other
items, uh, including rewritten

documentation, uh, real testing
infrastructure with unit tests and

end-to-end tests. Uh, there is a Kitchen
Sink app that's now live on the Play f-

Play Store, so you can take a look at some
of these features that we just talked

about, secure storage, geolocation,
gallery picture- picker, uh, that you

could download and kinda check that out on
your device to see how that feels, and

then, uh, you can, uh, take a look at the
merch store that they've also launched,

which is shop.nativephp.com.

Whoo, bunch of stuff there, all available
to you as of the time of this recording.

If you're using that, you should
definitely upgrade. Uh, it's a good one.

Thanks so much to Shane Rosenthal and the
team over there for writing this one up.

Next up, the Laravel Claude A-... code
setup repo is a one command setup for

AI-powered Laravel development with Claude
code and MCP servers. It will help you to

automatically configure all MC- MCP
servers for the ultimate AI-powered

Laravel development experience with Figma
integration. The Figma integration

features seems like they could be very
powerful, helping you automatically create

views, extract design system, build
components, and more.

Uh, main features include global MCP
servers that are shared across all of your

projects, GitHub integration that
accesses all your repositories to manage

PRs with automatic token configuration, a
memory system to remember decisions across

projects, Context 7, which is the latest
Laravel ph- which provides the latest

Laravel and PHP documentation access.
There is web fetch for accessing external

APIs and resources, Figma integration to
provide design-to-code workflows with

automatic design token extraction,
automatic design token extraction ,

providing colors, typography, and spacing
for Tailwind CSS, and a Laravel debug bar

providing real-time debugging if
installed, and more. Uh, it's pretty

simple to get up and running. There is a
curl command that you can run through

Bash, um, and then, uh, get everything up
and running.

You can get started with the package by
reading the readme and the docs folder,

which we'll have links to for you in the
show notes.

Well, hey, folks. We talked about a little
bit earlier that PHP 8.5 is getting

released in November 20th of this year, so
the next couple items that we have here

are all related to Laravel, sorry, not
Laravel, PHP 8.5. So, this first one is

written up by Paul Redmond, everyone's
favorite human, really good, and he talks

about, he- he goes into quite a bit of
depth on this. I'm just gonna skim the

surface on this one, and if you want to
read the additional details of it, please

feel free to go and read it. But the- the

headline is this, array_first_ and
array_last_ functions are being made

a reality inside of PHP 8.5. So,

this has had user land implementations and
polyfills by Symfony, by Laravel, by

other things, uh, throughout, you know,
forever, right? These- these

complement some things that were already
pulled in in PHP 7.3, which were

array_key_first_ and array_key_last.

But again, without going into too much
depth as far as how it works and how these

polyfill works, just know that
array_first_ and array_last_ will now be

available to you natively inside of PHP
8.5 in November.

-Perfect.
-There we go.

The pipe operator is also coming to PHP
8.5 when it will be released on November

20th. The operator is an exciting prospect
for PHP developers wanting to chain

multiple callables together, passing a
value through them from left to right in a

native way.

The pipe operator

accepts a single parameter callable on the
right and passes the left side value to

it, evaluating to the callable's result.
Now, if that doesn't make much sense to

you, any time you have used Laravel's
collections and chained on a filter and

then a map and then a first- or whatever,
this is a similar concept but supported

natively within PHP. So you can get a long
way to do things like

running a string through HTML entities and
then string split and then mapping to

uppercase things and then filter the
values, all using native PHP functions.

Um, the p- performance benefits would-
would be the main thing to do this, having

this functionality native. I wonder if
any of the Laravel connection stuff, uh,

collection stuff can be adapted to maybe
leverage this functionality under the

hood/behind the scenes. Uh, but it does
mean that there will be situations where

you can sort of map and filter and reduce
using the native pipe functionality in

situations where nec- you don't
necessarily have to reach for the

collection functionality. So,

uh, definitely check that out. Uh, it will
be released as part of PHP 8.5 in

November.

That is incredible, honestly. I- I just...

It feels like these things used to only
be...

They only existed in some

parallel universe where PHP was willing to
accept these sorts of things. And I feel

-like-
-Mm-hmm

... in the last couple releases, like, the
dam has broken and all of these amazing

new features are flooding in, and it just
feels like it is such a wonderful time to

-be a PHP developer, doesn't it? I mean-
-Yeah

... there's just so many cool features
that we get. And not only that, but we

have the community keeping us updated,
'cause that was some of the other parts of

it too, is I feel like it used to be that
Laravel... Oh sorry, not Laravel. PHP

-releases would kind of come and go-
-Mm-hmm

... and nobody was really any the wiser as
far as what the new features were. They

had, maybe there were some break/fix
things stuff in there, but there was none

of these new sort of banner features that
were coming out that people wanted to

upgrade to get. And this is one of those
big ones, the pipe operator. That's so

cool. Now, the syntax is really
interesting. I think it looks good, it's

-just gonna be weird to get used to.
-Mm-hmm.

It's sort of... You know what I mean? I'll
have to kind of go back and go, "What-"

-It's very uncharacteristic for PHP.
-Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like, what was that

-operator again? Pipe arrow?
-Yeah.

-Okay.
-Yeah.

Like that's just... You know, it's
interesting. I- I think it's a good one,

-right? It's-
-Yeah.

-You know?
-I think it's borrowed from, like,-

-I think it's got to come with this-
-.Dot Net or something like that.

-Okay.
-Or- or C Sharp. So it's... Yeah, it's,

there's- there's an established... And a
lot of the stuff that

PHP has been adding in recent times

does have

a history in other languages. And so it's-
it's easier to kind of

have something familiar for people that
move between languages, perhaps, when you

look at what's already out there before
implementing. I think the- the- the big

thing is, well,

not so much, you know, not wanting to do
things or not bringing things in because

Symfony had it or because P- uh, Laravel
had it, or whatever else. I think the-

the- the main reason

is because the PHP Foundation exists now.
That there is people that are actually

paid to develop and support PHP the
language, and they're doing this in a full

time capacity. That there is now active
community support...... to, you know,

enable people to work on this, not just in
their free time, not, you know, whenever

they're, they're a- able to, but to do it
in a full-time capacity. And that, I

think, has s- you know, moved a lot
forward in terms of the ability for PHP to

manage releases, to communicate releases,
to, to do more exciting things more often

and more regularly than, you know, what
we had before. So shout out to everyone

that is involved in that.

Absolutely. Well, uh, along with all of
this, you might be asking yourself too,

like, "How can I get started just testing
out PHP 8.5? What's the easiest way for me

to do that?" Well, we're gonna talk about
that a little bit here, but we're also

gonna talk about another feature that 8.5
introduces, which is a diff option

for the PHP INI flag. So

PHP-- INI previously would show you, hey,
here are the values, um, that are loaded,

uh, as well as maybe showing you here's
the path that you're loading it from. Um,

but this, uh, there's a couple cool new
things here, um, that are, are going to be

available to us starting in 8.5. So

you can use this diff, uh, to show you the
INI values that are different from the

built-in default values. So if you do
PHP-- INI=diff and it says, "Here are all

the loaded values that were made to be
different based on INI files that you were

loading in." And sometimes that's not
always easy to identify either. Where are

my loading these INI files from? Am I
loading multiple INI files? And so, uh,

Paul Redmond talks about how you can go
through and get a little taste of this as

well as, uh, mess around a bit with being
able to see not only what ones are

different, but where am I loading them in
from? And so he talks about specifically

here using Docker. Now, Docker is one of
those things some people don't really like

to get involved with it, and me being one
of those, raise your hand. Um, but he

talks about how you can use Docker in
order to be able to set up a new PHP 8.5

demo. And then he shows, here's how we can
see what the INI values are before, and

then here's how we can see what it looks
like after we load these, uh, INIs. And

then we can also see here are any loaded
configuration files, which is gonna point

you to all the INIs that got loaded in
order to produce that difference between

what the default values are and what your
new values are. So if this is something

you'd like to play with before 8.5 was
released, this is a great tutorial to go

through.

It's not a long one. We're talking about,

uh, 10-minute read here, right? From
actually getting it, started reading it,

to actually getting through the end of it
with a, a, a Docker 8.5 install. So should

be a good one. If that's something you'd
like to play with, definitely check that

one out.

The last PHP 8.5 feature we have to talk
about today is fatal error backtraces. In

PHP 8.5, a new fatal error backtraces
setting can control whether a backtrace is

shown for fatal errors. Fatal errors
without backtraces in today's stable PHP

versions, for example, 8.4, might include
parse errors for syntax errors, duplicate

functions or classes, infinite loops, and,
uh, max execution time and so on.

So if you run code in PHP 8.4, you'll get,
uh, if you try to declare a class

multiple times, for example, you'll get a
fatal error that says, "Cannot declare

class B because the name is already in
use." And it will just tell you where that

error happened. Starting in PHP 8.5,
you'll get more helpful information that

led to the fatal error. Clearly, this is
derive, uh, this is a, a contrived

example, but it will tell you where

the duplication happened. It'll give you,
uh, it'll tell you, this was previously

declared somewhere else, rather than just
saying that it has already been declared.

So, uh, the ini setting default value is
to show fatal error backtraces, meaning it

is enabled by default. But if for some
reason you wanna turn it off, you can set

that setting to 0 and you'll get back the
current state of affairs. Uh, we have

links to this and all of the PHP 8.5
updates in the show notes for you.

Okay. Moving on to packages. So this first
one, I was confused when I read it for

the first time because it says Volt in the
title.

-Mm-hmm.
-Laravel performance testing with volt test

PHP. Now if you were naive like me and
you think, oh, Laravel Volt, which was

introduced at, I think, like, Laracon 2023
US, I think, is where it was at? Um...

-It's been around a while. Yeah.
-Somebody talked about this, right? Which

is, like, um, these, like, LiveWire
components and, like, single, single file

component things. Not what we're talking
about. No need to really continue down

that path. This is talking about volt test
PHP, which, uh, if I'm reading its, in

its own title of what it claims to do, it
empowers developers to write and execute

performance, load, and stress tests for
their applications directly inside of PHP.

So what the Laravel performance testing
package does is this allows you to

use the volt test PHP SDK to create these
load tests for your Laravel applications,

uh, which some of the niceties that it
sort of folds in here is things like route

discovery, CSRF handling, reporting, and
more. So using the Laravel package, uh,

that we're talking about here, you can
quickly get up to speed using that volt

test, generating test files easily, and
starting to stress test your Laravel app

if that is in fact something you need to
do. The API looks really nice. You

basically set up a scenario and you set up
different steps that you'd like to test,

and then you can, uh, build it all out s-
very... In, in a fluent interface, uh,

very similar to how you'd build out... uh,
what you would do when inside of a PHP

unit sort of request life cycle. Here are
the things I want you to do, and then you

can go through, filter it out only to
particular, uh, tests that you want to

run, and then do your stress test there
with PHP Artisan Volt Test and run that

there. So it's easily, uh, configurable,
automatic route discovery, comprehensive

reporting, URL load testing. It comes with
artisan commands, configurable, uh,

through flexible config options, and then
it also has things like CSV data sources,

which you might think is, like, "W- why
would I need to do that for?" Well, if

you're wanting to load a bunch of
different data into these stress tests,

it's gonna require a large amount of it to
kind of run through for realistic

performance testing. And so, a lot of
times you're going to load that in through

some sort of CSV data source. It supports
that. So you can check this one out in

the show notes.

Intelligent parsing and formatting of
names in PHP apps. Uh, if you have ever

done anything that deals with a customer,
you know, like a CRM type thing or

anywhere where you're displaying names of
people, where it can be arbitrarily

entered into forms, Name of Person is a
PHP package inspired by Basecamp's Name of

Person Ruby Gem, which gives you
intelligent parsing and multiple

formatting options.

If you handle, uh, sorry, handle person
names in your PHP applications with

elegant formatting options, transform
names between multiple presentation

formats, the package provides a clean type
safe way to parse, store, manipulate, and

display person names consistently across
your application. So you can directly

instantiate a person name with a first and
last name as separate parameters, or you

can use static constructors for, uh, you
know, person name from full, and then you

can, from the parsed object, return the
first and the last name. It handles single

names as well. So if you had, say,
"prince,"

uh, you would get null back for the last
name. The package also has Laravel support

for cars that you can use with your
models, and the car support string based

cars configurations, as well as a fluent
method and JSON serialization.

Multiple format options are available.
There are nine different ways to display

names. There is full, familiar,
abbreviated, initials, sorted, possessive,

and mentionable. There is smart parsing
to intelligently handle full name strings

and edge cases. There is full
international name support with proper

multi-byte handling. Core functionality
means it works in any PHP project, and a

specific viral integration provides native
eloquent casting for seamless database

integration. So he talks about, um, you
know, familiar and initials and, uh,

possessive formatting options. So if you
had, um, Eric L. Barnes, as he likes to

sh- pla- place his name around the
internet. If you said that was his name,

then familiar would be Eric B., um, you
know, with a, with a sh- Initial for the

surname. Uh, initials, you could say name
initials to get E-L-B, to get the initials

of all of the names. Possessive for the
first name, so Eric's, Eric apostrophe S,

and so on and so forth. Uh, this is
useful, you know, if you're

sending emails to people, you might wanna
address them in a-

-Hmm. Good point
-... e- with a possessive. You might want

to, um, generate avatars if they haven't
uploaded an image with, with the initials

for their name and so on and so forth. So
definitely check this one out. Uh,

something that

we do in a number of different places, I'm
sure there are many of you listening who

have implemented these in various
different ways. Um, I know a favorite of

mine to get the first and last name is to
do, like, string of before space, and

-that's the first name-
-Yeah

... and string, string of after, you know,
that space means it's the last name. And

you can get caught out in places if people
have put in, like, a middle name or, or

things like that as well. But

a tested package that's built on top of or
off the, the work of Basecamp's Ruby Gem

means that

it's comprehensive. It's tested over a, a
long, long period of time. So definitely

check that one out.

Awesome.

Uh, last package before we get to to... To
these tutorials here. Uh, Laravel AI Chat

Starter Kit created by Pushpack Chahed is
a modern starter kit that features real

time streaming responses using Prism,
Inertia, Vue, and Tailwind CSS. Okay.

Don't sleep on this thing. Let me, let me
kind of put this down for you here.

If you are wanting to interact with an AI
model and you also are responsible perf-

for, for providing the interface that
allows you to interact with that model, as

well as stream back the responses, this
is a starter kit for Laravel that gives

you everything you need to get up and
running with that from zero really

quickly.

As I said, it's a starter kit. So as of
Laravel 12, we now have these starter kits

that you can ship things with. So to get
started with this, all you do is Laravel

new, and then you use PUSHPACK1300/AICHAT.
That's it. And it will give you all of

this ready to go. Real time AI responses,
which are streamed as they're generated.

Reasoning support, so it has support for
AI models with reasoning capabilities. I-

it allows for multiple AI providers. Thank
you, Prism. AI, OpenAI, Anthropic,

Gemini, Ollama, Grok, et cetera. All those
things. It has a built in authentication

system for user authentication and
management. It has a light and a dark

mode. It has custom theming with ShadCN.
So if you've not used Sha- ShadCN before,

uh, you know, this is something that's
usually... It was kind of created

originally for React, but it's been ported
over to Vue. So now you can do easy theme

customization with just simple CSS
variables. Really nice there. And then

also allows you to do chat sharing, which
is, uh, allowing you to share

conversations with other users. This is
something that ChatGPT has done in the not

too, um...... re- you know, not too
distant past, which has been really

helpful for myself. Specifically, I'll-
I'll write something up, wanna share it

with my wife. I either have to copy and
paste this whole conversation or I can

say, "Just share this over to this
person," and it kinda gives them the

entire context. So a really, really
comprehensive starter kit here, as well as

shipping with an enum that specifies the
model names that you'd like to use. So,

you know, you've got GPT-4-0-mini- mini,
and GPT-41-nano, and 04-mini. And

if you didn't know the names of these or
how they're specifically... It's sort of

like when you're doing regions for Amazon.
It's like, was it US, ES- US East 1 or

East 2, or which one was it? This just
kinda simplifies that for you by providing

an enum that has all those values ready
for you to go to plug in. So if this is

something you've needed to do, even if you
just wanted to play around with Prism,

this is a great spot for you to just grab
the starter kit, spin it up, and give it a

try. So really, really cool here. Thanks
to Pushpack and Chahajed for, uh, creating

that. Very nice.

Nice. Uh, several tutorials this week, all
of them from our favorite, Harris

Raftopoulos. All of them framework
reminders, if I have classified them

correctly. I'm gonna run through them all
and leave them to you, dear listener, to

go forward and read them. First up,
simplifying stream handling with Laravel's

resource method. We've got dependency
injection in Laravel closure commands,

Laravel's inarrayKeys rule allowing you to
validate partial array keys, content

negotiation with Laravel's prefers method.
There is Laravel request content type

inspection methods, as well as blade
authorization directives for Vue security,

enhancing JSON responses with Laravel's
modelappends property, enhanced Enum

processing with Laravel's default
parameter support, custom object casting

in Laravel models, and Laravel's
ruleContains method for fluent array

validation. All of these things that we
have spoken about at various points in

time on Laravel News, and Harris, as
always, has helpfully gone through and

just expanded on the high-level stuff that
we talk about on the show to give you

more context around how you might use some
of this functionality in your projects.

Yep. They are actually so well-written,
and he does a really good job breaking

down the high-level things that we're
talking about. When we're talking about

release things, a lot of times it's just
the bullet point version.

-Mm-hmm.
-Here's the feature, top level. And maybe

you don't have as much of a grasp on, "How
exactly do I use this inside my

application?" Or, "What are some examples
of places where I might use this?" He

takes all those and expands them to a full
tutorial and provides, uh, details on all

of that. Really well-written, really easy
to follow, and most of them you could

read through and understand within, I'm
talking five minutes, right? You should

definitely go through these, read these on
a lunch break. It's gonna be really

helpful. And there's so much stuff that's
going into the framework these days, it's

easy to lose that there's some of these
amazing things that you have never even

heard of, right? Even if you read through
the documentation, you might not know that

these things exist. So definitely check
these tutorials out. They're super val-

super valuable and are gonna help you
level up to the next

level. And also, speaking of,

if you're interested in leveling up to the
next level and you are over on the side

of the world, uh, where Australia is near
you, you should definitely be grabbing

your tickets to Laracon AU. Michael, give
us some dates that we should be looking

-at.
-Yeah. November 13th and 14th in Brisbane

this year. Um, we have sold over half of
our early bird allocation as well, uh, and

that will run until the 7th of August
unless sold out earlier. So if, uh, if

you've missed the boat on Laracon US,
then, uh, Laracon AU is happy for you to

join us. If you go to Laracon US and you
think you want some more Laracon in your

life, there will still be about a week to
grab your early bird tickets after that

happens. So I'd love to see you there.
And, uh, we're- we're in the thick of

announcing speakers at the moment as well.
So looking forward to getting all those.

It's one less secret I need to keep from
the community , so definitely enjoying

this part of, uh, the preparation process,
for sure.

Absolutely. Hey, folks. Michael and myself
will also be at Laracon US this year,

which is coming up right around the
corner. I think both of us will be there

on the... Ooh, let's see.

-28th.
-28th? Yes, we'll both be on the 28th. I'll

be there through the 31st. Please say
hello. We would love to see you and hear

from you. It's always great to, uh, hear
from people who are able to listen to the

show, and very much looking forward to
catching up with all you lovely folks

there. This has been episode 241. You can
find show notes for it at

podcast.laravel-news.com/241. Please rate
us up in your podcatcher of choice. Five

stars would be amazing if you enjoyed the
show. And of course, any comments or

questions you might have, hit us up on
BlueSky or on X @MichaelDerenda,

@JacobBennett, or @Laravel News. Folks,
until next time, it's been a fun one. We

will see ya.

Bye.