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Taylor Otwell: What 14 Years of Laravel Taught Me About Maintainability

(maintainable.fm)
105 points robbyrussell | 2 comments | 26 Aug 25 12:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.43s | source
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kiririn ◴[30 Aug 25 12:19 UTC] No.45073990[source]▶
Still maintaining a Laravel 3 project. Barely made it 2 years before maintainability became a nightmare and the only upgrade path was complete rewrite. Projects written without an opinionated framework easily sail past 10 years of comfy maintainability
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ianhawes ◴[30 Aug 25 13:37 UTC] No.45074585[source]▶
Laravel 3 and Laravel 4 were released in ~2012. The upgrade from Laravel 4 to 5 (released Oct 2013) is probably the biggest hurdle, but you can likely upgrade from Laravel 5 to Laravel 12 in a week or sooner with Laravel Shift.
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1. jt2190 ◴[30 Aug 25 14:37 UTC] No.45075045[source]▶
> The upgrade from Laravel 4 to 5 (released Oct 2013) is probably the biggest hurdle....

Can confirm. We started on Laravel 4 and it languished at that version until someone in leadership agreed to get it updated to version 8, which seemed to mostly be about some APIs changing. (The configuration system changed quite a bit for example.) Further upgrades from 8 to 10 then 11 have been very quick. (Note that we don't use Eloquent ORM so that wasn't part of these upgrades.)

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2. richbradshaw ◴[30 Aug 25 15:27 UTC] No.45075458[source]▶
We never did it - started but changes were too hard to manage on the large code base - we have L4 running on PHP 8.1/Mysql 8 and all is good currently!