Laravel Starter Kits: 5 NEW Features You May Have Missed

Hello guys. Next week I will be talking in London at Larvel Live UK about Larvel starter kits, past, present, and the future. So, they released the schedule and I'm on the second day and I decided to shoot a separate video about small part of that talk, which is new features in Larvel starter kits they released in recent months or weeks or even days. If you're not following the news closely on Twitter, you may have missed a few new features, which may be useful for you. Feature number one is the easy choice of off components. So, if you run Larvel new project and make a few choices with built-in authentication, for example, let's not use Boost for this example, and then in a minute you will see this. So, now you can easily enable or disable some things like registration, email verifications, and passkeys, new feature that is also fresh and I had a separate video about that. If you haven't watched that, I will link that in the description below. So, you can, for example, disable password confirmation. And let's try exactly that. And yeah, it is done and password confirmation is double confirmation of some more sensitive features. So, you can see four out of five are enabled. So, you can do that before even touching the code, directly in starter kit installer. The second new feature they released is Larastan added to all starter kits by default. What does that actually mean? So, if we go to composer.json, you see Larastan in required dev by default now. Which means that immediately after installation, you have this command available, PHP stan analyze, and it will analyze your code with static analysis. So, for example, then if you make some typo or, for example, in user model, you remove the type or create a new method without return type. Side note, by the way, did you know that initials function exists in the user model? So, now let's run analyze again and it will flag that this method has no return type specified. And if you're not that familiar with static analysis and Larastan, I have a separate course in 23, it was released in 2023, but it's still mostly relevant. The core of Larastan or underlying PHP Stan haven't changed much since then, but they increased in value, especially if your code is generated by AI agents at least partially. So, I'll link that course in the description below. So, I will show in that course, this is a text-based course, what exactly Larastan and PHP Stan can discover for you without even running your code. That's why it's called static analysis. So, this is now by default in all starter kits on level seven. That level seven, by the way, is defined in the file phpstan.neon, so you can edit the parameters here as well. Another thing that became included by default in all starter kits, also in require-dev, is a new package by Nuno Maduro. Now, it became the first party Laravel Pow, which is this GitHub repository, and all it does, basically, it shrinks the output of testing to this. And this is important for AI agents that run the test automatically, and this is to save the tokens. In my testing, it's not a huge deal, and I have a separate video about Pow. Again, I will link that in the description below. So, it's not 99.8% fewer, it's fewer for this output, maybe, but on the whole, majority of AI agent work is not about running tests, but you can save some token. Now, again, by default in all Laravel starter kits. The next pretty recent improvement is passkeys. Around a month ago, this is the tweet by Ben. So, basically, you should see sign in with passkey on your login screen, and I don't see that after installation because I'm not on HTTPS. This is the requirement for passkeys, but if I launch Hertz Secure and I refresh the browser, here we go. Sign in with a passkey. Again, I have a separate video about that, and I will link that in the description below. Also, they recently released a few improvements to the Teams function of Starter Kits, which was released also pretty recently, a few months ago. But, the flow of how the team invitations work is kind of debatable, so to speak, because it's not even their fault or the question to the creators of Starter Kit, like Wendell. It's a general question how those invitations should work. It's very individual. So, they improved that with a new flow, depending on if you do have account already, or you don't. And also, it's not auto-adding you to the team. Now, you will see this banner with pending team invitations. And also, small improvement to the Team Starter Kits. A few days later, users can now leave the team. Previously, it was the feature only for the owners of the team. Now, you can leave the team yourself as a user, as a member of the team. So, they constantly improve the Starter Kits and sub features of the Starter Kits, like Teams, pretty regularly. What also they improve is Laravel Boost, which is kind of a part of Starter Kits. I don't see the reason why not to install Laravel Boost in the first place. And now, when you run PHP Artisan Boost install, you will see the choice of not only packages, but these editors. They added more agents editors IDEs, whatever you call it. So, Anti-Gravity is now in the list, Zed is in the list, and Kira, I think, made the list a bit earlier. And Factory Droid is also a newcomer to that list. So, basically, they improve Laravel Boost, both guidelines and the tools, and small features. So, from time to time, I do advise to update Laravel Boost to get the newest features for your AI agents. So, yeah, these are the new features I wanted to show you from Laravel starter kits. Again, I will talk about them and much more on Laravel Live UK stage in a week, next week. The tickets are still available if I understand correctly because the button is still here. Actually, let's check. I'm not even sure. Buy tickets. So, yeah, it's still available. If you still want to get there next week to talk to me in person and many more other superstars of Laravel community. It's not an advertisement. I don't get paid for this video, but I just genuinely like the vibe of Laravel Live UK. I go there every year and this time for the first time as a speaker. And what do you generally think about Laravel starter kits new features or general current state? Mostly now managed by Wendell from the core Laravel team. Let's discuss in the comments below. What features would you like from starter kits? Maybe I'll pass it to the team while at the event or online. That's it for this time and see you guys in other videos.