Laravel, as a framework, has grown slowly but strongly since its inception and so is its ecosystem. The ecosystem here is all the packages/products that are built by the Laravel team which revolves around the original Laravel framework. This includes open-source packages and premium/paid products.

One of the handiest features of Laravel is the ability to dispatch Closures to queues. This is because you don’t always need to create a job class for simple tasks such as sending emails.

The standard way of including files in modern PHP development is using namespaces and autoloading of classes using Composer.

Sometimes there comes a scenario when you might want to pull the composer package’s GitHub repository as the composer package itself. This can be useful in situations where you want to upgrade something but because one of the dependencies is still not compatible with the current version of the software.

Laravel 8’s class-based model factories are great and I’ve written an entire article about what they are and how they are more feature-rich and useful than the traditional factories that we used to write prior to Laravel 8.

In modern web applications, one of the pain points everyone faces at some point is spam submissions to forms by automated bots.

One of the most prominent changes in Laravel 8 is the (kind of) new way of defining controller routes. Before Laravel 8, if you wanted to define a route, you could do it like so.

In the previous versions of Laravel, up to 7.x, when you wanted to rate limit certain routes, you could do it by assigning the throttle middleware to the route or group of routes like so.

The model factories in Laravel are a great way of seeding some fake data in the database for testing purposes which I’ve discussed in this article. While the previous implementation was great, Laravel 8 has given model factories a major overhaul and it makes them even better!

Apart from adding support for customizable maintenance mode views, Laravel 8 has also simplified the process of accessing the Laravel application in the maintenance mode.