Steps to upgrade Laravel 7 project to 8

A few years ago I had an old Laravel project that I built back in 2019. Back then I was still a junior developer and at that time I had no plans to host it. Fast forward to March 2024 I decided to host it in Heroku which I detailed in the last article .

One of my reasons for this post was to give a guide to help make the Laravel version upgrade experience as less time consuming, and straightforward as possible.

Before the deployment process l first skimmed through the docs and noticed that Heroku ended support for php 7 and this project runs on php 7.3. Easy I could just update the project dependencies by running this command below

$ composer update

and problem solved but here’s the problem a lot of these dependencies require a minimum dependency version in order for them to install. This can be solved by running

$ composer update  —ignore-platform-reqs

However, this is a careless move as it can break the whole project. Below are the steps on how I carefully upgraded the project to Laravel 8. Make sure the php version 8 is installed in your workstation. You can check which version is installed by running

$ php -v 

Open the composer.json file and in the require section modify the dependencies to match the below listed versions.

- php:^8.0
- guzzlehttp/guzzle: ^7.0.1
- laravel/framework: ^8.0
- laravel/passport: ^10.4.2
- phpunit/phpunit: ^9.0
- facade/ignition: ^2.3.6
- nunomaduro/collision: ^5.0
- laravel/ui: ^3.0

After that open your terminal in your project root and run;

$ composer update 

You might encounter some errors on terminal and so I’d advise you to search the package on packagist or look for it’s website to check which dependency version the package requires and modify accordingly.

There are new changes and styles introduced in Laravel 8. Follow these steps and modify accordingly.

Seeders

Rename the database/seeds directory to database/seeders. Now open each seeder class and add a namespace on top of the line like this

<?php
    
 namespace Database\Seeders;

Factories

Next in factories open each factory class and add this line

<?php

 namespace Database\Factories;

Auto load seeder classes and factory clssses**

Open your composer file and modify the section autoload to match this one below.

{ 
  ...,
  "autoload": {
      "psr-4": {
        "App\\": "app/",
        "Database\\Factories\\": "database/factories/",
        "Database\\Seeders\\": "database/seeders/"
      }
  }
}

Routing

Open the RouteServiceProvider.php and modify it to reflect the standard Laravel 8 RouteServiceProvider.php. Next update the routes in web.php and api.php files to match this style below;

Route::post(‘register’[RegisterController::class,‘register’])→name(‘register’);

That’s it !