Laravel 5.7 released with support for email verification, improved console testing

Laravel 5.7.0 has been released. The latest version of the PHP framework includes support for email verification, guest policies, dump-server, improved console testing, notification localization, and other changes.

The versioning scheme in Laravel maintains the convention—paradigm.major.minor. Major releases are done every six months in February and August. The minor releases may be released every week without breaking any functionality.

For LTS releases like Laravel 5.5, bug fixes are provided for two years and security fixes for three years. The LTS releases provide the longest support window. For general releases, bug fixes are done for 6 months and security fixes for a year.

Laravel Nova

Laravel Nova is a pleasant looking administration dashboard for Laravel applications. The primary feature of Nova is the ability to administer the underlying database records using Laravel Eloquent. Additionally, Nova supports filters, lenses, actions, queued actions, metrics, authorization, custom tools, custom cards, and custom fields.

After the upgrade, when referencing the Laravel framework or its components from your application or package, always use a version constraint like 5.7.*, since major releases can have breaking changes.

Email Verification

Laravel 5.7 introduces an optional email verification for authenticating scaffolding included with the framework. To accommodate this feature, a column called email_verified_at timestamp has been added to the default users table migration that is included with the framework.

Guest User Policies

In the previous Laravel versions, authorization gates and policies automatically returned false for unauthenticated visitors to your application. Now you can allow guests to pass through authorization checks by declaring an "optional" type-hint or supplying a null default value for the user argument definition.

Gate::define('update-post', function (?User $user, Post $post) {

   // ...

});

Symfony Dump Server

Laravel 5.7 offers integration with the dump-server command via a package by Marcel Pociot. To get this started, first run the dump-server Artisan command:

php artisan dump-server

Once the server starts after this command, all calls to dump will be shown in the dump-server console window instead of your browser. This allows inspection of values without mangling your HTTP response output.

Notification Localization

Now you can send notifications in a locale other than the set current language. Laravel will even remember this locale if the notification is queued. Localization of many notifiable entries can also be achieved via the Notification facade.

Console Testing

Laravel 5.7 allows easy "mock" user input for console commands using the expectsQuestion method. Additionally, the exit code can be specified and the text that you expect to be the output via the console command using the assertExitCode and expectsOutput methods.

These were some of the major changes covered in Laravel 5.7, for a complete list, visit the Laravel Release Notes.

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