Laravel is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

PHP-based

web framework A web framework (WF) or web application framework (WAF) is a software framework that is designed to support the development of web applications including web services, web resources, and web APIs. Web frameworks provide a standard way to build a ...

for building web applications. It was created by

Taylor Otwell Laravel is a open-source software, free and open-source PHP-based web framework for building web applications. It was created by Taylor Otwell and intended for the development of web applications following the model–view–controller (MVC) ar ...

and intended for the development of web applications following the

model–view–controller Model–view–controller (MVC) is a software architectural pattern commonly used for developing user interfaces that divides the related program logic into three interconnected elements. These elements are: * the model, the internal representat ...

(MVC)

architectural pattern Software architecture pattern is a reusable, proven solution to a specific, recurring problem focused on architectural design challenges, which can be applied within various architectural styles. Examples Some examples of architectural patte ...

and based on Symfony. Some of the features of Laravel include modular packaging system with a dedicated dependency manager, different ways for accessing

relational database A relational database (RDB) is a database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) is a type of database management system that stores data in a structured for ...

s, utilities that aid in application deployment and maintenance, and its orientation toward

syntactic sugar In computer science, syntactic sugar is syntax within a programming language that is designed to make things easier to read or to express. It makes the language "sweeter" for human use: things can be expressed more clearly, more concisely, or in an ...

. The

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

of Laravel is hosted on

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

and licensed under the terms of the

MIT License The MIT License is a permissive software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts very few restrictions on reuse and therefore has high license compatibility. Unl ...

History

Taylor Otwell created Laravel as an attempt to provide a more advanced alternative to the CodeIgniter framework, which did not provide certain features such as built-in support for user

authentication Authentication (from ''authentikos'', "real, genuine", from αὐθέντης ''authentes'', "author") is the act of proving an Logical assertion, assertion, such as the Digital identity, identity of a computer system user. In contrast with iden ...

and

authorization Authorization or authorisation (see American and British English spelling differences#-ise, -ize (-isation, -ization), spelling differences), in information security, computer security and identity management, IAM (Identity and Access Managemen ...

. Laravel's first

beta release The software release life cycle is the process of developing, testing, and distributing a software product (e.g., an operating system). It typically consists of several stages, such as pre-alpha, alpha, beta, and release candidate, before the fi ...

was made available on June 9, 2011, followed by the Laravel 1 release later in the same month. On September 5, 2024, Laravel announced that they had received $57 million in

Series A A series A is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. It can be followed by the word round, investment or financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exchan ...

funding from Accel.

Framework history

Laravel 1 included built-in support for authentication, localisation,

models A model is an informative representation of an object, person, or system. The term originally denoted the plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin , . Models can be divided int ...

, views, sessions, routing and other mechanisms, but lacked support for controllers that prevented it from being a true MVC framework. Laravel 2 was released in September 2011, bringing various improvements from the author and community. Major new features included the support for controllers, which made Laravel 2 a fully MVC-compliant framework, built-in support for the inversion of control (IoC) principle, and a templating system called ''Blade''. As a downside, support for third-party packages was removed in Laravel 2. Laravel 3 was released in February 2012 with a set of new features including the cmd

command-line interface A command-line interface (CLI) is a means of interacting with software via command (computing), commands each formatted as a line of text. Command-line interfaces emerged in the mid-1960s, on computer terminals, as an interactive and more user ...

(CLI) named ''Artisan'', built-in support for more

database management system In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and an ...

s, database migrations as a form of

version control Version control (also known as revision control, source control, and source code management) is the software engineering practice of controlling, organizing, and tracking different versions in history of computer files; primarily source code t ...

for database layouts, support for handling events, and a packaging system called ''Bundles''. An increase of Laravel's userbase and popularity lined up with the release of Laravel 3. Laravel 4, codenamed ''Illuminate'', was released in May 2013. It was made as a complete rewrite of the Laravel framework, migrating its layout into a set of separate packages distributed through

Composer A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and def ...

, which serves as an application-level package manager. Such a layout improved the extensibility of Laravel 4, which was paired with its official regular release schedule spanning six months between minor point releases. Other new features in the Laravel 4 release include database seeding for the initial population of databases, support for

message queue In computer science, message queues and mailboxes are software-engineering components typically used for inter-process communication (IPC), or for inter- thread communication within the same process. They use a queue for messaging – the ...

s, built-in support for sending different types of email, and support for delayed deletion of database records called ''soft deletion''. Laravel 5 was released in February 2015 as a result of internal changes that ended up in renumbering the then-future Laravel 4.3 release. New features in the Laravel 5 release include support for scheduling periodically executed tasks through a package called ''Scheduler'', an abstraction layer called ''Flysystem'' that allows remote storage to be used in the same way as local file systems, improved handling of package assets through ''Elixir'', and simplified externally handled authentication through the optional ''Socialite'' package. Laravel 5 also introduced a new internal directory tree structure for developed applications. Lumen 5.0 is the initial release of the Lumen framework, a light derivative of Laravel optimized for speed. This initial release is based on the Laravel 5.x series of PHP components, and following versions reflect the Laravel versions with which it shares common infrastructure. As of 2022, authors no longer recommend the use of Lumen for gaining these advantages, and promote Laravel Octane instead. Laravel 5.1, released in June 2015, was the first release of Laravel to receive

long-term support Long-term support (LTS) is a product lifecycle management policy in which a stable release of computer software is maintained for a longer period of time than the standard edition. The term is typically reserved for open-source software, where it ...

(LTS). New LTS versions were planned for one every two years. Laravel 5.3 was released on August 23, 2016. The new features in 5.3 are focused on improving developer speed by adding additional out of the box improvements for common tasks. Laravel 5.4 was released on January 24, 2017, with many new features like Laravel Dusk, Laravel Mix, Blade Components and Slots, Markdown Emails, Automatic Facades, Route Improvements, Higher Order Messaging for Collections, and many others. Laravel 6 was released on September 3, 2019. It incorporated shift blueprint code generation, semantic versioning, compatibility with Laravel Vapor, improved authorization responses, improved job middleware, lazy collections, and sub-query improvements. The frontend scaffolding was removed from the main package and moved into the laravel/ui package. Laravel 7 was released on March 3, 2020, with new features like Laravel Sanctum, Custom Eloquent Casts, Blade Component Tags, Fluent String Operations and Route Model Binding Improvements. Laravel 8 was released on September 8, 2020, with new features like Laravel Jetstream, model factory classes, migration squashing,

Tailwind CSS Tailwind CSS is an open-source CSS framework. Unlike other frameworks, like Bootstrap (front-end framework), Bootstrap, it does not provide a series of predefined classes for HTML element, elements such as buttons or tables. Instead, it creates ...

for pagination views and other usability improvements. Laravel 9 was released on February 8, 2022. Laravel 10 was released on February 14, 2023. Laravel 11 was released on March 12, 2024. It was announced on the Laravel blog and other social media, it was also discussed in detail at Laracon EU in Amsterdam on 5–6 February. Along with Laravel 11, a first-party websocket server called Laravel Reverb was released.

Release history

Starting with Laravel 5 and up to Laravel 8, versions designated LTS were supported with bug fixes for 2 years and security fixes for 3 years. Other releases were supported with bug fixes for 6 months and security fixes for 1 year. As of version 8, major versions are released yearly, and the support timeline was changed to provide every version with 18 months of bugfixes and 2 years of security fixes. For additional libraries, only the latest major release receives bug fixes.

Laracon

''Laracon'' is the official Laravel conference centered around the Laravel framework, covering its development, uses, and related general

software development Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

topics. Laracon has taken place in the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...

and online in the past. Typically, the conference happens in the

and

every year. 2017 was the first year a Laracon was held as an online event only. 2018 was the first year a Laracon was held in Australia. Each year the conference has a different variety of sponsors and organizers, but Laravel, Laravel News and UserScape are usually the primary organizers. While the numerous Laracon conferences are officially run, a number of other conferences are run under the name of Laravel Live. Currently, there are yearly held Laravel Live UK, Laravel Live Denmark, Laravel Live Pakistan and Laravel Live India conferences. While these are not officially run, they have permission from Taylor Otwell to use the name Laravel.

References

External links