What's a new in Laravel 5.5?

Laravel 5.5 require PHP 7.0+

            Laravel 5.5 now requires PHP 7.0 or newer to run. PHP 7.0 was written to be faster and to use less memory to accomplish the same task that earlier versions of PHP would have taken to handle.

LTS Release

            After Laravel 5.1, Laravel 5.5 is scheduled to be the next LTS release. This includes two years of bug fixes and three years of security updates.

Error Handling with Whoops

            Whoops actually does is that it makes the annoying PHP errors and exceptions a little less annoying by changing how they appear. As you can see in the image that it sports the lines of the file in which the error or exception occurred and traces back the operation till inception. And not forgetting to mention, it has zero dependencies (currently('pre-laravel-55')).

Email Themes

            Laravel 5.4 offers markdown mailable but there was no option for customization. In Laravel 5.5 you can use your custom styles for emails.

Laravel Migrate Fresh Command

            Laravel 5.5 add Artisan command to the migrate: namespace. This is similar to migrate:refresh but rather than rolling back your existing migrations, it drops all tables and migrates them from start. The difference between rolling back migrations and dropping tables is that rolling back migrations runs the drop method for each of them. Whilst, the migrate:fresh command simply drops all off of the tables and starts from scratch.

Error Pages: Design Improvement:

            Little change is made in the design of the error pages like 404 or 50* errors: there are some design additions with Flexbox getting the error message centered on the page.

Model Factory Generators

            You can now easily use a new artisan command to create custom factory generators.

$ php artisan make:factory PostFactory

            This will make a new file called PostFactory.php in the database/factories folder. What makes it a lot better is that you can also generate a factory while making a model.

$ php artisan make:model Post -f

            The command above will not only create a model, it will also create a model factory, a post controller, and posts migration in one fell swoop! That’s a pro-tip right there.