Laravel 5.4

Yesterday, after playing around with Laravel 5.4 for a few days on my dev environment, I upgraded this site. The only issue I had was with the testing, which I addressed in the previous post. The PHPUnit issues were easily resolved by installing laravel/browser-kit-testing and updating my existing tests to reference the new BrowserKitTest.php class instead of the old TestCase.php. The issue of the naming of the test files was in fact due to autoloading, and I resolved it by adding the following to my composer.json under the "autoload-dev" classmap section:

"tests/BrowserKitTest.php"

After upgrading from 5.3 to 5.4 you need to clear your view cache, which you can do with:

php artisan view:clear

And the upgrade guide also suggests clearing the route cache with:

php artisan route:clear

I have never had an issue with the route cache, but I have often had issues with the view cache, so I personally clear my views after most of my updates.

The other thing to be aware of when upgrading to 5.4 is that tinker is no longer part of Laravel, so needs to be installed separately as laravel/tinker. I believe it is installed by default with a new installation of 5.4, but if you are upgrading you need to do this, especially if you use tinker as frequently as I do.

I haven't used any of the new features of 5.4 yet, from reading the upgrade guide there aren't really many features that jump out at me as something I would make a lot of use of, but I'm sure I will in the future.