I’m thrilled to announce the release of Laravel Zero 5.7. It features the optional installation of Laravel Queues, introduces humbug/box for fast application bundling, a variety of other bug fixes and usability improvements.

Laravel Zero is unofficial (not affiliated to Laravel LLC), and is a customized version of Laravel optimized for building command-line applications.

Laravel Zero 5.7 is built on top of Laravel 5.7, the latest release of the Laravel framework. Please check the upgrade guide: Upgrading To 5.7 From 5.6.

Please visit the Laravel Zero website to see all the documentation. Be sure to watch this screencast for a demo of Laravel Zero.

Queue component

Queues allow you to defer long-running, or resource intensive processes until a later time. A queue system is imperative for larger applications but can be helpful for smaller ones as well.

Laravel Zero’s component installer

You can now install this component optionally using the app:install command. After the installation, you will get access to Laravel’s queue features, such as the make:job command and workers. The configuration file is stored in config/queues.php .

An example of a job being processed by queue workers

Like many other parts of the framework, Laravel Zero’s queued jobs functions identically to Laravel’s queued jobs. So, to learn more about queuing jobs in Laravel Zero, please review the full Laravel queue documentation.

Say Hello to Box

Laravel Zero allows you to build a standalone PHAR archive to ease the deployment or distribution of your project. The build will provide a single PHAR archive, ready to use, containing all the code of your project and its dependencies.

This feature was already introduced on Laravel Zero 5.6, but the internal behavior of build feature has changed in Laravel Zero 5.7. We are now using humbug/box to provide fast application bundling.

Laravel Zero’s build process

The build feature relies on a configuration file for loading PHAR packaging settings, those settings can be modified on the box.json present in the base path of your project.

The default box.json file provided in Laravel Zero 5.7

To learn more about the box.json configuration file, please review the full humbug/box configuration documentation.

Console Testing Improvements

Laravel 5.7 comes with a pretty neat way for testing console commands, and Laravel Zero also leverages this feature.

Please see detailed information about this feature on Mohamed Said’s blog: Testing Artisan Commands in Laravel 5.7+.

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! 🎉

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