With 840,413 live websites (as of the time of writing) and 8% of the market share, Laravel has been one of the foremost well known PHP frameworks for many years now. It’s elegant, and scalable has become one of the landmark frameworks for developers and companies working with PHP.
Laravel 9 is the first-ever Long Term Back (LTS) released in a 12-month release cycle. In this article, we’ll quickly look at its prerequisites and features before showing you how to install it on Cloudways.
What are Laravel 9 Prerequisites?
Laravel 9 requires the following:
What’s New with Laravel 9?
Laravel 9 brings with it some major new features. These are some of the most noteworthy ones:
- New design for routes list: With this change, it becomes much easier to oversee big routes within the console.
- Default Anonymous Stub Migrations.
- Theme improvement: You can now customize or select accessible themes at your convenience.
- New Query Builder Interface
- PHP string function: The new version focuses on utilizing string function that incorporates str_contains()
- Default timeout in HTTP clients of 30 seconds.
- Shift from SwiftMailer to Symfony Mailer for more consistency for your application.
You can read more about the latest Laravel 9 features in detail here.
Install Laravel 9 on Cloudways
As you know, Cloudways offers a 7.4 version by default, and Laravel 9.x requires a minimum PHP version of 8.0.
Let’s first update the PHP version on the Cloudways platform.
Switching PHP Versions on Cloudways
Move to the side menu and select Settings and Packages. At the top, you’ll see the PHP version, where you can upgrade from PHP 7.x to PHP 8.0.
it’s highly recommended that you simply do not go for an update if your web application is running on a Laravel system or any PHP-based CMS live site.
If you’re creating a new web application without any PHP system or PHP-based CMS, you can make an upgrade, but proceed with caution.
Click on PHP 8 from the drop-down menu.
The update process takes a few minutes. Your server will be updated without any downtime.
That’s it! It’s that easy to change your PHP version using Cloudways Platform.
Nothing as Easy as Deploying Laravel Apps on Cloud
With Cloudways, you can have your PHP apps up and running on managed cloud servers in just a few minutes.
Next, to verify that PHP 8 is indeed available at your server, launch the SSH terminal from the Master Credentials tab and log in using your credentials.
Use the php -v command to check the installed PHP version.
To start the Laravel 9 installation process on the server, open the SSH terminal to run the Composer command. You’ll either utilize the Putty terminal or Cloudways SSH terminal as per the prerequisites.
Let’s start with Cloudways SSH terminal. Go to the application public_html folder and type the following Laravel installation command:
command composer create-project laravel/laravel:^9.0 test-app.
Now, go to your application path: APPLICATION-URL/test-app/public/, where you will see the following screen.
Conclusion
Cloudways offers a convenient platform to install Laravel 9 and host your application on different cloud servers. This also gives you access to Cloudways features on top of Laravel 9’s, including a free SSL certificate by Let’s Encrypt, an optimized PHP stack, CloudwaysBot for prompt notifications, vertical scaling, and top-notch specialized support.
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Shahzeb Ahmed
Shahzeb is a Digital Marketer with a Software Engineering background, works as a Community Manager — PHP Community at Cloudways. He is growth ambitious and aims to learn & share information about PHP & Laravel Development through practice and experimentation. He loves to travel and explore new ideas whenever he finds time. Get in touch with him at [email protected]
