Laravel Spark - 5.3 upgrade
#Laravel 5.3 is out! But what about Spark? Can we upgrade it too? Is it free? Let's check it out.
The plan
A Spark installation is built on Laravel, but it is still different from a standard Laravel application. Besides the framework, a little Spark app is living next to your files. With the Spark artisan commands you are able to pull changes and update Spark itself. This is why upgrading a Spark application to Laravel 5.3 needs two steps.
1. Upgrade the framework
In order to upgrade the Laravel framework just follow the upgrade guide. This can take up to 3 hours.
For me this was the perfect time to try out Laravel Shift. It is an automated way to upgrade Laravel applications. You grant the application access to your repository and it will send a pull request within minutes. This will take care of ~ 90% of the upgrade. Depending on your code, there may be some files that could not be changed. The PR contains comments to let you know about these files. This will save you a lot of time and costs only $9. (costs depending on the shift) It is definitely worth a try and the money!
2. Upgrade Spark
Several have asked if Spark upgrade to Laravel 5.3 will be a paid upgrade. It won't. It will be a free upgrade. (Taylor Otwell)
So luckily Taylor made this Spark upgrade free. So all we have to do now, is calling the update command: php artisan spark:update. Now we got the latest Spark version running on Laravel 5.3.
Conclusion
Now you should have a Spark installation up and running on Laravel 5.3! That's awesome. Check out all the new features to make your app even better. Also take a look at the community notification channels for Laravel. Some drivers like Slack or SMS are already built into Laravel, but there are dozens of drivers which are not. This is why this project is providing lots of other drivers just for you.