I’m thrilled to announce the release of Laravel Zero 5.8. This release adds improvements over the app:build Artisan command, and better compatibility with the Windows environment.

Laravel Zero is unofficial (not affiliated to Laravel LLC), and is a customized version of Laravel optimized for building command-line applications. As usual, this release it’s based on the latest versions of Laravel components.

Laravel Zero 5.7 will not receive bug fixes anymore. Please check the upgrade guide: Upgrading To 5.8 From 5.7.

Dig right in! Visit the Laravel Zero website.

Artisan Self Update Command

Since the early versions of the framework, Laravel Zero provides the app:build Artisan command that allows to build a standalone PHAR file to ease the deployment or distribution of your project.

In this new version of Laravel Zero 5.8, you can optionally install the self-update component using the Artisan command app:install self-update .

After the installation, the self-update Artisan command will be available in applications in PHAR mode.

Once your users execute the self-update command, Laravel Zero will try to find new versions of your application on Github using the information available in your composer.json file.

At the time of this writing, Laravel Zero only uses Github to try to find new versions of your application. To learn more about the Self Update Command in Laravel Zero, please review the Documentation.

Different environment variables per PHAR

It is often helpful to have different configuration values based on the environment where the PHAR application is running. With Laravel Zero 5.8, you can now place a .env file in the same directory of any PHAR file.

Menus are now optional

To improve the compatibility with the Windows environment, we have decided to make interactive menus (not available on windows), an optional feature in Laravel Zero. You may wanna re-active this feature, using the app:install menu Artisan command:

Get involved

This is a community project, there are many opportunities to contribute to the whole Laravel Zero ecosystem.

Feel free to contact me on twitter: @enunomaduro.

Thanks, I hope you enjoy this new release! 🎉