Laravel 9 Official Release: New Features and Improvements

Laravel 9 has been officially released as the next long‑term support (LTS) version, with error fixes supported until February 2024 and security fixes until February 2025. The release cycle has changed to roughly one major version per year.

The release was delayed to allow the underlying Symfony components to be upgraded to Symfony 6.0, aligning Laravel’s annual releases two months after Symfony’s.

Key new features in Laravel 9 include:

Minimum PHP version requirement is PHP 8.

New design for routes:list .

Added --coverage testing option to display coverage directly in the terminal.

Default use of anonymous stub migrations.

New query builder interface.

Support for PHP 8 string functions.

Mail functionality migrated from SwiftMailer to Symfony Mailer.

Flysystem 3.x integration.

Optimized Eloquent accessors and mutators.

Implicit route model binding using Enums (PHP 8.1).

Controller route groups.

Enum Eloquent attribute casting.

Force scoped bindings.

Laravel Breeze API & Next.js scaffolding.

Laravel Scout database engine.

Full‑text index / where clause support.

Inline Blade template rendering.

Soketi Echo server.

Optional Bootstrap 5 pagination view.

Optimized Ignition exception page.

New str() and to_route() helper functions.

For a complete list of changes, see the Laravel 9 release notes and upgrade guide; tools like Laravel Shift can help automate the upgrade process.