Update: Laravel Shift is now available and can upgrade your Laravel applications from Laravel 4.2 to the latest version of Laravel.

This past week I presented All Aboard for Laravel 5.1 at the 2015 PHP[world] conference. This talk focused on the new features in Laravel 5.0 and steps to upgrade from Laravel 4.2.

In researching this talk, I only found one resource, aside from the official Upgrade Guide, detailing the upgrade process. I was surprised to not find a Laravel upgrade tool. The changes from Laravel 4.2 to Laravel 5.0 were significant, yet straightforward and easily automated.

Fortunately Taylor Otwell, creator of the Laravel framework, was also at PHP[world]. He was not aware of any automated upgrade tool and expressed interest in such a tool.

So during the conference hackathon Shift was born. I wrote an initial Shift to automatically upgrade a Laravel 5.0 application to Laravel 5.1.

I was able to get a few alpha testers from Taylor's initial tweet. However, I am still looking for additional alpha testers. If you have a Laravel 5.0 application and it's available through Git please contact me.

In the meantime, I am going to use Laravel Spark to create a site where developers can log in with their GitHub account and easily submit their Laravel projects for automated upgrade. Shift will automatically upgrade the project and submit a pull request for review.

I hope to have the site live as well as a Shift ready for Laravel 5.2 release in December.

I welcome your feedback to gauge interest and request features. And please, contact me to alpha test the Laravel 5.0 Shift. It's a free upgrade!

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