What Are the New Features in Laravel 5.5?

Laravel 5.5 requires PHP 7.0 or higher. See our review for the features brought by this modern PHP version.

Laravel 5.5 is also the next LTS (long-term support) version. This means two years of bug fixes and three years of security updates. The same goes for Laravel 5.1, but its two-year bug fix window will end this year. Without further ado, let's see what this new version offers.

Main improvements

• Automatic Package Discovery: Simplifies the process of using third-party packages by automatically registering service providers and appearance without manual configuration.
• Renderable email: Render email layout directly in the browser, enhancing the ease of testing and previewing emails without actually sending.
• Exception helper functions: Introduces throw_if and throw_unless for more expressive and conditional exception handling.
• New front-end presets: Includes React.js, allowing developers to quickly build front-end frameworks using the artisan preset command.
• Whoops integration is used for error handling: Recover Whoops! error handler for a more informative and user-friendly error debugging experience.
• Enhanced Artisan Command Features: Artisan commands for custom validation rules and model factories simplify the process of adding new rules and generating model factories.

Create a new Laravel 5.5 project

Since this version has not been officially released yet, we can install the development version by running the following command:

<code class="language-bash">laravel new laravel55 --dev
cd laravel55
php artisan key:generate</code>

If you don't want to use the Laravel installer, you can also use Composer:

<code class="language-bash">composer create-project --prefer-dist --stability=dev laravel/laravel:dev-master
cd laravel
php artisan key:generate</code>

After accessing the homepage of the new settings app, we should see a welcome page similar to the ones in previous Laravel versions.

Render email in browser

I think this will be very convenient. In previous versions of Laravel, we had to send actual emails or use email clients like Mailtrap to test email layouts, which was not an easy task. In Laravel 5.5, this will no longer be the case because it can render the email layout directly into the browser.

Quick walkthrough on how to achieve this: Let's create a new email for the current project along with an email template:

<code class="language-bash">php artisan make:mail Welcome --markdown=emails.welcome</code>

I prefer the markdown method because we get a template that already contains some content. Let's open the web.php file and create a test route to view the email layout:

<code class="language-php">Route::get('/email', function () {
    return new App\Mail\Welcome();
});</code>

routes/web.php

Access Routing /email, we should be able to preview the email template:

What actually happens behind the scenes is that in Laravel 5.5, the Mailable class implements a Renderable contract, which has a render() method. This is the implementation of the render() method in lluminate/Mail/Mailable.php:

<code class="language-bash">laravel new laravel55 --dev
cd laravel55
php artisan key:generate</code>

lluminate/Mail/Mailable.php

This method makes it possible to get the view. If we try to return an instance of a class that does not implement the Renderable contract in the route, we will get a UnexpectedValueException exception.

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