What’s New in Laravel 5.8

Automatic Policy Discovery

First up on the agenda is automatic policy discovery. In past versions of Laravel, each time a policy class is generated, you’d need to visit your AuthServiceProvider to manually wire it up with the appropriate model. It’s not the end of the world, but still nonetheless a bit tedious. Now in Laravel 5.8, as long as you follow the standard naming convention, this policy discovery happens automatically.

Update Your Cache TTL

A small, but important breaking change in Laravel 5.8 is the switch from minutes to seconds for all cache TTLs. In your codebase, track down any reference to cache()->put(), cache()->remember(), or any other variants, and do the necessary math to convert the expiration date from minutes to seconds (multiply by 60).

Use the New Postmark Driver in One Minute

Laravel 5.8 ships with a new Postmark mail driver, which is convenient since that’s what Laracasts uses for all transactional emails. In this lesson, I’ll show you how to create a new Postmark server, and send email through their API…all in one minute.

New Mockery Testing Helpers

Often, when preparing your tests, you’ll need to mock a class, set an expectation, and then update the related instance in Laravel’s service container with your mocked version. Laravel 5.8 now ships with two testing helpers to simplify this setup a good bit: $this->mock() and $this->spy().

Automatic Event Listener Discovery

My favorite new features are often the ones that streamline your daily workflow. With that in mind, I’m happy to report that, as of Laravel 5.8.9, Taylor has implemented optional automatic event listener discovery into the framework. Let’s review the essentials, as well as how listener classes are discovered behind the scenes.