Sep 27, 2017

An Introduction to Laravel 5.5 : Exploring all new features

Introduction

Laravel 5.5 is the latest stable version of Laravel framework, released on August 30, 2017.It is the next long-term support (LTS) version of Laravel after 5.1 that is going receive bug fixes for two years, and security fixes for next three years.

Laravel 5.5 is an enhancement in 5.4 and comes with new features like Collection Dumping, Package Auto-discovery, queued job chaining, React front-end presets, renderable mailable and many more that make development more enjoyable and easier.

In this article we are going explore all-new features of Laravel 5.5.

Laravel Package Auto-Discovery :Automated Package discovery

In prior versions of Laravel, installing a package will several additional steps such as after installation registering every new package in providers and facade array of config/app.php file.

Now, with Laravel 5.5 Laravel Package Auto-Discovery feature will automate this tasks for you . It will automatically register your package facades and service providers

Lets see an example by installing barryvdh/laravel-debugbar package.

Installing a Package in Laravel

To install this package change your PWD(present working directory) on terminal to Laravel root folder by running cd your-directory and running below command

composer require barryvdh/laravel-debugbar

Once package installation is successed, just reload you web app on browser. What you are seeing the debug bar is available to your application without doing any additional configuration.Actually this magic is done by Laravel Package Auto-Discovery.

Enable Package Auto-Discovery , package developer just have to add their service providers and facades to their package’s composer.json file like below:

"extra": {
   "laravel": {
            "providers": [
                "Barryvdh\\Debugbar\\ServiceProvider"
            ],
            "aliases": {
                "Debugbar": "Barryvdh\\Debugbar\\Facade"
            }
        }
},

New Frontend Presets: Added support for React and bootstrap.

In prior versions of Laravel only Vue scaffolding is included,In Laravel 5.5 new Frontend Presets options are available for bootstrap and React including Vue.In fresh installation of laravel 5.5 you can swap your Vue scaffolding to React scaffolding using the artisan preset command.

php artisan preset react

You can also preset none command to remove the JavaScript and CSS framework scaffolding completely from application.

php artisan preset none

Renderable Mailables: Test your emails directly on Browsers

Renderable Mailables feature of Laravel 5.5 allows you to render your email contents on browsers.It helps you test your email contents on browsers rather testing the email view on test email servers. Mailables can now be returned directly from routes, allowing you to quickly preview your mailable’s designs in the browser:

Route::get('/mailable', function () {
    $user= App\User::find(1);

    return new App\Mail\WelcomeMail($user);
});

When you call above route in your browser. It will simply render the “WelcomeMail” contents on the browser.