Laravel History and Versions

Laravel History

Taylor Otwell created the Laravel; it was created as an attempt to provide an advanced alternative to the CodeIgniter framework.

The CodeIgniter does not provide several features such as built-in support for user authentication and authorization.  Laravel`s first beta release was on 9th June 2011.

The Laravel 1 has built-in support for authentication, localization, models, views, sessions, routing, and other mechanisms, but it lacked support for the controllers that are prevented it from an MVC Framework.

The Laravel 2 was released on September 2011; it brings many improvements. New features that included the support for the controllers, by which the Laravel 2 version made an MVC-compliant framework. It built support for the Inversion of Control (IOC) principle, and Blade Templating system. As downside support for third-party packages which was removed in Laravel 2.

The Laravel 3 was released on February 2012. It was released with the new features that include the Command-Line Interface (CLI) which named as Artisan, built-in support for Database Management Systems, database migrations with a form of version control for database layouts; it supports the handling events and a packaging system that is known as Bundles.

The Laravel 4 was released on May 2013; it has another name which is used while coding called Illuminate, as a complete re-write of the Laravel Framework, migrating its layout into a different set of separate packages distributed through the Composer. It serves as an Application-Level Package Manager, such types of layout improve the performance of Laravel 4. Other new features of the Laravel 4 releases and include Database Seeding for increasing the population of the databases, it supports the message queues, built-in support for sending different types of email and it also supports in delaying the deletion of the records which called Soft Deletion.

The Laravel 5 was released on February 2015; it was released as a result of internal changes that ended up in the renumbering the future release Laravel 4.3.

In Laravel 5, the new features include scheduling the executed tasks periodically through a package called Scheduler. An abstraction layer that is known as Flysystem, it allows remote storage which is used in the same way as file systems, handling of packages assets through Elixir. It simplified the handling of external authentication through an optional package called Socialite.  Laravel 5 also introduced a directory tree that is new for the structure of the developed application.

The Laravel was listed as the most popular PHP framework by a SitePoint survey in March 2015.

The Laravel 5.1 was released on June 2015. It was the first release of Laravel which receives a Long-Term Support (LTS).

The Laravel 5.3 was releasedon 23rd August 2016. In Laravel 5.3 version, the new features are focused on the improvement of the speed of developers by adding common tasks.

The Laravel 5.4 was released on 24th January 2017. This version has different new features like Laravel Dusk, Laravel Mix, Blade Components and Slots, Markdown Emails, Route Improvements, Higher Order Messaging for Collections, and many more.

The Laravel 5.5 was released on 30th August 2017.

The Laravel 5.6 was released on 7th February 2018.

The Laravel 5.7 was released on 4th September 2018.

The Laravel 5.8 was released on 26th February 2019.

Laravel Release History

The Laravel versions LTS supported bug fixes for 2 years and the security for the 3 years. The other releases supported bug fixes for 6 months and security fixes for 1 year. 

History and version of Laravel