What’s new in Laravel 9?

Laravel 9, released on February 8, 2022, marks a significant update in the PHP web framework's lifecycle, transitioning to an annual release cycle to better align with Symfony and provide more time for bug fixes. This version introduces several new features and enhancements, including PHP 8 as the minimum requirement, the replacement of Swift Mailer with Symfony Mailer, and the introduction of new query builder interfaces to improve type hinting. Additionally, Laravel 9 offers better accessor and mutator capabilities in Eloquent, full-text search capabilities via the new Scout database engine, and enhanced validation of nested array data. It also includes features like inline Blade rendering, improved exception pages with light and dark themes, and Bootstrap 5 pagination views. Furthermore, Laravel 9 introduces the Soketi echo server as a WebSocket server alternative and adopts anonymous stub migration as the default to prevent name collisions. With the introduction of Flysystem 3.x for file manipulation and options for setting up with Docker, Laravel 9 is poised to enhance developer experience and maintain its role as a leading PHP framework.