NEW Laravel 13: Main Things You Need to Know

Hello guys. So Laravel 13 is officially released as every year they release a new major version every March. So what's inside? In this video I will show you not that many new features to be honest but we will try it out in action. So first when you run Laravel new you will not see much different things except for downloading Laravel version 13.0 zero and maybe a few versions of underlying packages are upgraded. All the other installation is pretty much as it was except for one thing, the ordering of Laravel boost. Do you see when it was triggered? So boost was upgraded to be triggered after the npm commands. So this is a change not in Laravel 13 but very recent yesterday. This is a new version of Laravel installer which you should upgrade anyway and keep upgrading to receive those new features. But this thing move boost install after installation of node packages because then boost can detect those packages after they are npm installed. So now Laravel boost will see more things for you. It's not actually visually seen. But just so you know, boost guidelines are no better if it's after npm install. And now on my homepage, I can refresh and you can see the animation for Laravel 13 version. So that's the installation. Now what features are inside and what you need to know for that? There's a page called release notes. Let me zoom that in and let's scroll through that because scrolling is enough in this case. There are not that many new features, no breaking changes, which reminded me of a video on Laravel 12 I shot a year ago, no new features, and I called it the boring version. And this thumbnail was I was in Egypt at that time. So, I shot this picture to specifically express that it's a boring version, but in a good way. So Laravel 13 continues that tradition of being stable which is also very good for AI agents which are trained on Laravel versions before Laravel 13. So new version will not add much for AI agentic changes. But if we scroll through that release notes what do we see? First important thing is minimum PHP version 8.3 now. So for Laravel 12 it was 8.2 2. Now it's bumped to 8.3 which you should upgrade anyway again because of life cycle of PHP language. And also another important thing that Laravel 11 doesn't get security fixes anymore. So if you care about security fixes and you're still on Laravel 11, you probably should upgrade especially since the upgrade isn't that big at all. In fact, now let's try to upgrade. So in the official tweet there's this new thing. So I will open Laravel 12 project and run upgrade from Laravel boost and let's see what happens. So here's a project I installed earlier today this morning on Laravel framework 12 at the time for AI related video and this is basically just the starter kit and let's open cloud code and let's try upgrade. Well no the default upgrade seems to be related to cloud code not that one. Laravel boost upgrade seems to be only for LiveWire 4. Maybe I need to upgrade Laravel boost as well. So let's do composer update on that project and let's see if Boost new version comes up. And yeah, as expected, Boost 2.3.4, which was released 50 minutes ago and unrelated, but here's the one 2.3.2. I think that's the one. Add upgrade Laravel prompt. Actually, let's read what's inside. Right. So, it's following live wire upgrade prompts. Let's try again. So, I will launch cloud code fresh and then let's see upgrade. Yep, now we have it. Laravel boost upgrade Laravel version 13. What is happening? Is it just that agent will upgrade and I don't need to check anything else? So, did they actually kill Laravel shift in a way? Let's see. Actually, this is another topic for another video. I should probably compare this to Laravel shift update and see what happens. But for now, let's see if it actually works and what else we need to do. Code bases clean. So just composer JSON update here with tinker update to version three and something else was str snake session. This is kind of a small thing. Serializable classes and yeah that's it. Upgrade complete. Summary of changes since it was just starter kit as the agent says no application code changes were needed. Out of curiosity let's see what's inside. What is the prompt behind that? So here's the prompt. Laravel 12 to13 upgrade specialist upgrade process. This is actually pretty big. So I will not read it in this video but you get the idea. You upgrade boost and then launch upgrade command with your AI agent. And if you try let me know in the comments. Did it work for you? And now finally let's finish reading the release notes of Laravel 13. Minimal breaking changes as I mentioned already. And actually I talked to Taylor Otwell at Laracon EU and India before about Laravel 13 and he just confirmed that Laravel 13 will be official release of some of the things that were even in Laravel 12. So for example, Laravel AI SDK becomes stable with Laravel 13. But I covered Laravel AI SDK previously on this channel and separately I have a course on Laravel daily AI SDK 6 practical examples and I will probably upgrade it in 2026 later with more examples but that AI SDK isn't actually new. Also JSON API resources it's not also a new thing on my channel. I covered that they were released actually in version 12.45 45 a few months ago, but they were released pretty silently without fancy announcements. So now they are kind of officially out in the wild. Then a few small things, expanded PHP attributes. This is probably the most significant visual change. So in many more places you may see something like this. So middleware authorize and other PHP attributes. I probably will shoot a separate video about them in action. But in the documentation here, you may see just a few of examples and also I had a few more examples in my article after Laracon EU where Taylor showed PHP attributes. So I will link that article as well in the description below. Then if we scroll down the release notes, some minor things. Semantic vector search. This is also pretty big, but it was also released in Laravel 12 for posgrql. You can now use vector search which is powering AIS SDK. So now we can use something like where vector similar 2. And look at that, we're done here. Basically, there's nothing else that you need to know about Laravel 13. That's it. Boring version. stable version, good version. There are actually a few more things that Taylor promised related to starter kits with Laravel 13 about teams in starter kits and pass keys in starter kits, but those will be separate topics. For now, I don't see them released yet. So maybe they come out later and I will have separate videos on those as well as upgrade versus Laravel shift. I'm personally interested how it works now and if I see anything else comes up related to Laravel 13 or new starter kits or something like that of course as always I will cover that on this channel. So subscribe to not miss any other videos and also you may subscribe to a newsletter mailchip newsletter that I've been sending for I don't know many years now 10 12 I stopped counting so basically every Thursday I summarize what happened in Laravel ecosystem including the tweets now I have a separate page community tweets so I will also send those as a part of weekly newsletter so if you're not on Twitter or if you are but you cannot keep up which is totally understandable Then of course also subscribe to that newsletter. Absolutely free, no membership required. So yeah guys, what do you think about Laravel 13? Did I miss any details? We can discuss as always in the comments below. That's it for this time and see you guys in other