Laravel 12

Laravel released the new version 12.x, as is customary in the first quarter of the year. I’m not saying it, the documentation does:

Laravel and its other first-party packages follow Semantic Versioning. Major framework releases are released every year (~Q1), while minor and patch releases may be released as often as every week. Minor and patch releases should never contain breaking changes.

• Laravel community

The framework has become quite solid and stable since version 9.x, so these changes between major versions rarely include 'breaking changes'. Therefore, this new version comes with few but powerful new features:

Support Policy

With each new update, the end-of-support and end-of-life dates for each version are published:

Starter Kits

The only new functionality released for this version is the new starter kits for JS frameworks:

• Vue
• React
• Livewire

Using InertiaJS as a backend-frontend connection tool, as well as support for SSO to log in with Google, Github, Microsoft, Apple, and many other social and authentication platforms.

React

React is a powerful JS framework, using version 19.x of React with a focus on SPA (single page application), styling with TailwindCSS, and offering a high-quality component library through Shadcn UI.

Vue

Vue is my favorite JS framework (this blog is built with it, after all). Following the same approach as React, this starter kit focuses on SPA, using TypeScript, TailwindCSS, and Shadcn UI Vue.

Livewire

Last but not least, Livewire has steadily grown into a viable option for developing applications with Laravel. With its latest release, version 3.6, it seems to increasingly focus on inline JavaScript tools with AlpineJS. This starter kit includes TailwindCSS, the official Livewire library Flux, and the option to install Volt.

WorkOS

The most powerful new feature, in my opinion, in this version of Laravel is the AuthKit with WorkOS, a centralized authentication platform for our Laravel applications through various platforms like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Github, and many others.

Once you’ve chosen to start your application with WorkOS AuthKit and configured the corresponding credentials, when you attempt to log in, you’ll find a page like the following:

These are all the functionalities that Laravel 12 offers so far. Of course, alongside this release, the main focus was on Laravel Cloud, which I also have a post about, you can read more here.