Upgrading to Laravel 9: Modernizing Your PHP Workflow

Prerequisites

To follow along, you should have a solid grasp of PHP and previous experience with Laravel 8. You must have PHP 8.0 or higher installed, as this version drops support for older PHP environments.

Key Libraries & Tools

• Flysystem v3: Powers the Storage facade with a rewritten, modern architecture.
• Symfony Mailer: Replaces the deprecated Swift Mailer for all email operations.
• Guzzle: The underlying engine for Laravel's HTTP client.

Code Walkthrough

Simplified Route Groups

Laravel 9 introduces a more readable way to group routes that share a single controller. This eliminates the need to repeat the controller class name for every route definition.

use App\Http\Controllers\OrderController;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;

Route::controller(OrderController::class)->group(function () {
    Route::get('/orders/{id}', 'show');
    Route::post('/orders', 'store');
});

Previously, you had to pass an array or a string for every single route. The controller() method keeps your routes/web.php file incredibly dry.

Enum Route Binding

With PHP 8.1 support, you can now type-hint PHP directly in your route signatures. Laravel automatically performs the backing-value lookup or returns a 404 if the value is invalid.

enum Status: string {
    case Shipped = 'shipped';
    case Delivered = 'delivered';
}

Route::get('/orders/status/{status}', function (Status $status) {
    return $status->value;
});

Syntax Notes

• Anonymous Migrations: By default, php artisan make:migration now uses return new class extends Migration. This prevents class name collisions when merging features from different branches.
• HTTP Timeouts: The HTTP client now defaults to a 30-second timeout. This prevents hanging processes in your queue workers if a third-party API stops responding.

Practical Examples

• Storage Operations: When using Storage::put(), be aware that Flysystem v3 now overwrites files by default. Always use Storage::exists() if you need to prevent data loss.
• Queue Maintenance: Use the updated php artisan queue:flush --hours=24 to prune old failed jobs without wiping your entire history.

Tips & Gotchas

• Mailer Migration: If you use withSwiftMessage, you must rename it to withSymfonyMessage to avoid crashes.
• Validation Changes: Be careful when validating nested arrays. Laravel 9 no longer returns unvalidated keys in the $request->validated() output, which is a breaking change from version 8.