Laravel 5.7: What's New, Release History & Support Lifecycle

What Is New in Laravel 5.7

Laravel 5.7 introduces a set of focused improvements to developer experience and application capabilities. The update brings a new email verification package, enhanced console testing, and several syntactic sugar additions.

How does Laravel 5.7 improve email verification?

Laravel 5.7 includes a built-in solution for verifying user email addresses. This scaffolding provides the routes and controllers needed to send verification links and confirm user emails.

In practice, this saves significant development time. You can activate it by implementing the MustVerifyEmail interface on your User model. The framework handles the entire flow out of the box.

What developer console improvements were made?

Testing Artisan commands is now much simpler with the new artisan test method. This method allows you to call commands and make assertions on their output and exit code directly in your test suite.

$this->artisan('email:send')
     ->expectsQuestion('Which provider?', 'mailgun')
     ->assertExitCode(0);

This is a cleaner and more intuitive way to test interactive console commands compared to previous methods.

What new URL handling was added for pagination?

The paginator can now maintain the original query string parameters across all pagination links. You can set a default query string using the new withQueryString method.

Paginator::defaultView('pagination::view');
Paginator::defaultSimpleView('pagination::view');

This is useful for preserving filters and sort orders when users navigate through paginated results, improving the overall user experience.

How are UUIDs better supported?

New methods were added to the Str and Eloquent builder classes for working with UUIDs. You can now generate UUIDs and query models by them more easily.

use Illuminate\Support\Str;

$uuid = Str::orderedUuid();

The orderedUuid method generates a timestamp-first UUID that is efficient for database indexing. This matters for applications using UUIDs as primary keys for scalability.

What about API resource improvements?

API resources gained the ability to conditionally include relationships and attributes. You can now use the whenLoaded method to include relationships only if they have been eager loaded.

public function toArray($request)
{
    return [
        'name' => $this->name,
        'email' => $this->email,
        'posts' => PostResource::collection($this->whenLoaded('posts')),
    ];
}

This prevents unnecessary database queries and keeps your API responses lean and efficient.