Laravel

Laravel is a free and open-source PHP-based web framework for building web applications. It was created by Taylor Otwell and intended for the development of web applications following the model–view–controller (MVC) architectural pattern and based on Symfony. Some of the features of Laravel include modular packaging system with a dedicated dependency manager, different ways for accessing relational databases, utilities that aid in application deployment and maintenance, and its orientation toward syntactic sugar.

The source code of Laravel is hosted on GitHub and licensed under the terms of MIT License.

History
Taylor Otwell created Laravel as an attempt to provide a more advanced alternative to the CodeIgniter framework, which did not provide certain features such as built-in support for user authentication and authorization. Laravel's first beta release was made available on June 9, 2011, followed by the Laravel 1 release later in the same month. Laravel 1 included built-in support for authentication, localisation, models, views, sessions, routing and other mechanisms, but lacked support for controllers that prevented it from being a true MVC framework.

Laravel 2 was released in September 2011, bringing various improvements from the author and community. Major new features included the support for controllers, which made Laravel 2 a fully MVC-compliant framework, built-in support for the inversion of control (IoC) principle, and a templating system called Blade. As a downside, support for third-party packages was removed in Laravel 2.

Laravel 3 was released in February 2012 with a set of new features including the cmd command-line interface (CLI) named Artisan, built-in support for more database management systems, database migrations as a form of version control for database layouts, support for handling events, and a packaging system called Bundles. An increase of Laravel's userbase and popularity lined up with the release of Laravel 3.

Laravel 4, codenamed Illuminate, was released in May 2013. It was made as a complete rewrite of the Laravel framework, migrating its layout into a set of separate packages distributed through Composer, which serves as an application-level package manager. Such a layout improved the extensibility of Laravel 4, which was paired with its official regular release schedule spanning six months between minor point releases. Other new features in the Laravel 4 release include database seeding for the initial population of databases, support for message queues, built-in support for sending different types of email, and support for delayed deletion of database records called soft deletion.

Laravel 5 was released in February 2015 as a result of internal changes that ended up in renumbering the then-future Laravel 4.3 release. New features in the Laravel 5 release include support for scheduling periodically executed tasks through a package called Scheduler, an abstraction layer called Flysystem that allows remote storage to be used in the same way as local file systems, improved handling of package assets through Elixir, and simplified externally handled authentication through the optional Socialite package. Laravel 5 also introduced a new internal directory tree structure for developed applications.

Lumen 5.0 is the initial release of the Lumen framework, a light derivative of Laravel optimized for speed. This initial release is based on the Laravel 5.x series of PHP components, and following versions reflect the Laravel versions with which it shares common infrastructure. As of 2022, authors no longer recommend the use of Lumen for gaining these advantages, and promote Laravel Octane instead.

Laravel 5.1, released in June 2015, was the first release of Laravel to receive long-term support (LTS). New LTS versions were planned for one every two years.

Laravel 5.3 was released on August 23, 2016. The new features in 5.3 are focused on improving developer speed by adding additional out of the box improvements for common tasks.

Laravel 5.4 was released on January 24, 2017, with many new features like Laravel Dusk, Laravel Mix, Blade Components and Slots, Markdown Emails, Automatic Facades, Route Improvements, Higher Order Messaging for Collections, and many others.

Laravel 6 was released on September 3, 2019. It incorporated shift blueprint code generation, semantic versioning, compatibility with Laravel Vapor, improved authorization responses, improved job middleware, lazy collections, and sub-query improvements. The frontend scaffolding was removed from the main package and moved into the laravel/ui package.

Laravel 7 was released on March 3, 2020, with new features like Laravel Sanctum, Custom Eloquent Casts, Blade Component Tags, Fluent String Operations and Route Model Binding Improvements.

Laravel 8 was released on September 8, 2020, with new features like Laravel Jetstream, model factory classes, migration squashing, Tailwind CSS for pagination views and other usability improvements.

Laravel 9 was released on February 8, 2022.

Laravel 10 was released on February 14, 2023.

Laravel's 11 update was released on March 12, 2024. It was announced on the Laravel blog and other social media, it was also discussed in detail in EU Laracon which was organized in Amsterdam on 5–6 February. Along with Laravel 11, a first-party websocket server called Laravel Reverb was released.

Release history
Starting with Laravel 5 and up to Laravel 8, versions designated LTS were supported with bug fixes for 2 years and security fixes for 3 years. Other releases were supported with bug fixes for 6 months and security fixes for 1 year. As of version 8, major versions are released yearly, and the support timeline was changed to provide every version with 18 months of bugfixes and 2 years of security fixes. For additional libraries, only the latest major release receives bug fixes.

Features
Laravel boasts a variety of features that make it a comprehensive framework for web development:


 * 1) Eloquent ORM: Laravel's object-relational mapping (ORM) tool, Eloquent, allows developers to interact with databases using an object-oriented syntax. It supports CRUD operations and provides an active record implementation for working with database models.
 * 2) Routing: Laravel offers a built-in routing mechanism, developers can use to define application routes. This feature includes support for route groups, named routes, and route model binding.
 * 3) Blade Templating Engine: Blade is a first-party templating engine that allows the use of dynamic PHP directives in HTML-based views. It provides features such as template inheritance, sections, and conditional statements, that can be used to create dynamic content.
 * 4) Middleware: Middleware allows filtering of HTTP requests entering the application. It can be used for various tasks such as authentication, logging, and CORS headers management.
 * 5) Queue System: Laravel includes a unified API for different queue backends, such as Beanstalkd, Amazon SQS, and Redis. This system helps in managing tasks like sending emails or processing data in the background which can enhance application performance.
 * 6) Broadcasting: This feature allows real-time data broadcasting using WebSockets. It helps in building real-time applications such as chat apps and notifications.
 * 7) Task Scheduling: The built-in task scheduling feature enables the execution of scheduled tasks within the application. This abstraction can unify the management of cron jobs by allowing them to be defined in the Laravel application itself.
 * 8) Security: Laravel includes several security features out of the box, such as CSRF protection, password hashing, and encryption. It also provides several methods for validating and sanitizing user input.
 * 9) Authentication Scaffolding: Laravel provides built-in authentication scaffolding for handling user registration, login, and password reset processes. This feature streamlines the implementation of user authentication and management in web applications or by using API.

Performance
Laravel includes a number of features to help developers improve performance of their applications.


 * 1) Caching: Laravel provides a driver-based caching system that supports various backends like Memcached, Redis, and file-based caching. Caching can significantly improve the performance of an application by reducing the load on the database or other heavy tasks.
 * 2) Optimization Commands: Laravel includes several Artisan commands to optimize the framework's performance. These commands can be used to cache configuration files, routes, and views, reducing the overhead during runtime.
 * 3) Queue Management: By offloading time-consuming tasks to background queues, queues helps improve the responsiveness of applications. The Laravel queue system supports multiple queue backends, which aids when scaling the application.
 * 4) Database Optimization: Laravel’s Eloquent ORM includes features like lazy loading, eager loading, and query caching, which help optimize database queries and improve performance.

Testing
Laravel includes a number of other packages to build testing suites with.


 * 1) Unit Testing: Laravel includes PHPUnit and PestPHP, two popular PHP testing frameworks. It also provides various testing tools and assertions to facilitate unit testing of application components.
 * 2) Feature Testing: Laravel allows developers to write feature tests that simulate user interactions and test the application’s behavior from the user's perspective. This ensures that the application works as expected.
 * 3) Mocking: Laravel integrates with Mockery, a mocking library, to allow developers to create mock objects and define expectations for testing dependencies and interactions.
 * 4) Browser Testing: Laravel Dusk provides a headless browser automation and testing API for end-to-end testing. It allows developers to test the entire application in a real browser environment

Security
Laravel includes a number of tools for reoccurring security measures most applications will need.


 * 1) CSRF Protection: Laravel automatically generates and verifies CSRF tokens for form submissions, protecting against cross-site request forgery attacks.
 * 2) Authentication and Authorization: Laravel provides built-in authentication services, including user registration, login, and password reset. It also offers simple and flexible authorization mechanisms to manage user permissions and roles.
 * 3) Encryption: Laravel uses the AES-256 and AES-128 encryption standards to provide secure encryption and decryption of data. The framework includes built-in helpers for encrypting and decrypting strings.
 * 4) Validation: Laravel’s validation system allows developers to validate user inputs and protect against malicious data. It includes a variety of validation rules and supports custom validation logic.

Artisan command line
Laravel's command-line interface (CLI), called Artisan, was initially introduced in Laravel 3 with a limited set of capabilities. Laravel's later migration to a Composer-based architecture allowed Artisan to incorporate different components from the Symfony framework, resulting in the availability of additional Artisan features in Laravel 4.

The features of Artisan are mapped to different subcommands of the Artisan command-line utility, providing functionality that aids in managing and building Laravel-based applications. Common uses of Artisan include managing database migrations and seeding, publishing package assets, and generating boilerplate code for new controllers and migrations; the latter frees the developer from creating proper code skeletons. The functionality and capabilities of Artisan can also be expanded by implementing new custom commands, which, for example, may be used to automate application-specific recurring tasks.

Laracon
Laracon is the official Laravel conference centered around the Laravel framework, covering its development, uses, and related general software development topics. Laracon has taken place in the United States, Europe and online in the past. Typically, the conference happens in the United States and Europe every year. 2017 was the first year a Laracon was held as an online event only. 2018 was the first year a Laracon was held in Australia. Each year the conference has a different variety of sponsors and organizers, but Laravel, Laravel News and UserScape are usually the primary organizers.

While the numerous Laracon conferences are officially run, a number of other conferences are run under the name of Laravel Live. Currently, there are yearly held Laravel Live UK, Laravel Live Denmark and Laravel Live India conferences. While these are not officially run, they have the permission of Taylor Otwell to use the name Laravel.