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Comment by daveaiello | Hacker News Reader

Could somebody say, if you are planning to embark on a new Laravel project and you have no experience, how to begin?

I bought a subscription to Laracasts, and there is a "What's New in Laravel 9" series. But "Laravel from Scratch" is still on 8.

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Go with the "Laravel from Scratch" on v8 to learn the basics. Then follow up with the "What's new in Laravel 9". I'll be updating to v9 this spring. Laravel has been pretty stable since they changed to semver for versioning (ie v6). The framework is fairly stable. They held off the v9 release so it could have the new Symphony components. A lot of features that would have been released with v9 were added to the v8 framework. v9 may have some breaking changes, but I'd have to really dig through the release notes to find what would affect my app.

I'm more concerned with updating PHP from 7.4.x to 8.x then the framework update. Our test env had issue with one of our blade templates when running under 8.x.

Yep -- I am more worried about the PHP side because there you run into the question of whether other PHP devs whose packages you use are as good as the Laravel guys.

The Laravel from Scratch will still largely be applicable, the changes in 9 won't be breaking enough for you to be missing out a lot. The upgrades tend to be painless with a few small tweaks you might have to make (and those are usually described on the upgrade page).

If I were you, I'd start with Laravel 8.0 as you go through the Laracasts, and when done, go to the upgrade page of Laravel 9.0 and checkout the changes.

Don't be afraid to investigate the other frameworks as well. Both symfony and laminas have a lot to offer and tend to be less all-encompassing. Laravel is the right choice to get something simple from 0 to 60 quickly, but if you need to do complex things or integrate legacy systems it can be a lot more punishing.

You could try LUMEN which is a lite version of Laravel. Took me around a day or two to fully get what was happening. I'm at the point now where I want to switch a big project I've been working on over to Laravel but it's a bit of a PITA.

Anyway, for hello world stuff or a small api project try beginning with LUMEN.

https://lumen.laravel.com/docs/8.x

Lumen is mainly feature complete and its mostly recommended to just use Laravel and unload the service providers you dont need.

Correct, Laravel + Octane is now recommended instead of Lumen.

I've onboarded plenty of people in the past couple of years to Laravel.

The changes from v5 -> v6 were the larger than most of the changes from v6 to now. Even then, those 5->6 changes weren't that bad.

You can follow along with Laracasts on v8 and upgrade to 9 when you're ready. It will be an easy transition.

Also take a look at Code Course [0]. Good stuff and reasonable pricing.

[0] https://codecourse.com/

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