Laravel Update 4.1.24 to 4.2

Question

im currently working on an update from laravel 4.1.24 to 5.6 The problem is i got nearly no experience with laravel. My question is now, how do i properly upgrade. Should i first upgrade to 4.2 and then to 5.0 and so on or would it be better to upgrade directly to 5.6 and how should i do this? I mean there are so many changes that i think i could miss something. Also the project is just in a github repository, so it's hard to check if it's still working after an upgrade because i dont got the old modules. Or would it be enough to go on laravelshift. com and just upload it there to go from 4.1 to 4.2, 4.2 to 5.0 and so on.

Best regards!

Answer 1

Start from here and follow instructions to upgrade it to 4.2. Then go through your packages and update their versions accordingly. When done use dropdown list in the top-right corner to select next version (5.0) and repeat it until you are at 5.6.

You definitely need to be able to run your code and test it somehow after each step because there will be problems. From 4.1 to 5.6 is a big leap and a lot of packages might have breaking changes etc. I only migrated as far as from 5.1 to 5.6 and it took me whole day to fix everything.

As for automated upgrade you can try it as well, but as I already mentioned you need to be able to test your work because all packages need to be updated as well.

Answer 2

The Laravel documentation contains a whole list of breaking changes that can help you to upgrade your application to a newer version. Laravel Shift is a service that checks and updates these changes in your project.

However, there is no way of being sure that your project will still work after these upgrades. Especially if you are using external modules its very risky.

If it is not required, I would not recommend upgrading from 4.1.x to 5.6 unless you have a lot of time on your hands. A solution could be to set up a completely new 5.6 project and add the project code file by file and test the implementations.