Laravel Turns Five

Five years ago today Taylor announced the first release of Laravel to the world.

I’ve been working on this framework for about 7 months. I’ve worked really hard to make it powerful, yet accessible. I set out to launch with documentation as good as CodeIgniter from day one, and I think we did. The syntax is intuitive and expressive.

Even though a lot has changed and improved since that first release the code still has that same feel. Here is an example of the way routing was:

'GET /' => function() 
{ 
    return View::make('home/index'); 
}

Like all newborns that first release was very minimal–no controllers, no Eloquent, no templating system. It had enough to get you started but lacked the niceties we now enjoy. Here is a look at some of the major items that have been added to the framework in the past five years that we now take for granted:

• Artisan
• Authorization
• Authentication
• Blade
• Cashier
• Collections
• Composer
• Controllers
• Elixir
• Eloquent
• Homestead/Valet
• Migrations/Seeding
• Middleware
• Queues
• SSH Tasks

When I first found Laravel it was late 2011 or early 2012 and I just had a gut feeling this could be big. I jumped on board not long after by creating Laravel News to share news with the community. I’m thankful I was in the right place at the right time and this has enabled me to meet so many friends from all across the world.

Happy birthday Laravel and a big thank you to Taylor and the entire community.

Originally published at Laravel News on June 11, 2016.