Use Laravel Shift for your next upgrade

Joe • November 22, 2016

laravel

I've had an eye on LaravelShift.com since it first made it's way across my twitter feed some time ago. I've also had the pleasure of meeting and talking with it's creator Jason McCreary at a few conferences over the past year. I think it's really awesome when community members are able to take a product to market that not only scratches their own itch, but can provide value to the rest of the community as well.

When I'm talking about Laravel console commands with Artisan I often reference a silly project I built on a whim that is still running today: NerdsAreDrinking. The idea is very simple; scan the twitter feeds of my friends and myself then retweet any untappd beer checkin. This was purely an experimental project and I was amused at the results found on the NerdsDrinking twitter feed. Let's not kid ourselves, this is no mission critical production application. The entire application comes down to one single file.

I built NerdsAreDrinking on Laravel 5.1 because that was the current version at the time. We have seen two more release since: 5.2 and 5.3. The upgrade process isn't terrible however there is a lot you may need to take into account. Rather than upgrade from 5.1 to 5.2 and then 5.2 to 5.3 I decided to use Laravel Shift to do the 5.1 to 5.2 upgrade for me.

The Laravel Shift process was pretty easy (Especially when I realized I wanted the Application Shift and not the Package Shift) and the response time on the Pull Request being opened was very quick. You can see the Pull Request from Shift here: https://github.com/svpernova09/NerdsAreDrinking/pull/13 I was really impressed at how clean this process was. The instructions are very clear and the comments are concise and easy to understand. Linking to the default version of the files is also invaluable. As you can see I had to manually reset a handful of files to their default values but overall Laravel Shift saved me time and was well worth the $11 I spent on the shift. I still need to upgrade from 5.2 to 5.3 but I'll certainly use Shift again.

If you're dreading doing that Laravel upgrade process I highly recommend you give Laravel Shift a try.

Hope this saves you some time. Thanks for reading.