Laravel Autolink Laravel Package

Getting Started

Version 10.0.0 is a major release, but the breaking surface is narrow: Laravel 13 support plus three behavioural fixes to the parsing/validation layer (ignored tags, email local-parts, www. link detection). Treat it as a "bump constraints, re-run your fixtures" upgrade rather than a rewrite.

composer require <vendor>/<package>:^10.0
php artisan vendor:publish --tag=<package>-config   # if you haven't already
php artisan config:clear

Where to look first:

1. composer.json of the package — confirm the new Laravel/PHP floor. 10.0.0 supports Laravel 13, which almost always implies a higher minimum PHP version than your 9.x constraint allowed. Check your own composer.json platform requirement before bumping.
2. config/ in the package — this is where ignored/allowed tags and any parsing toggles live. The tag-matching fix changes how values in this file are interpreted.
3. The package's tests/ directory — the release notes describe exact behaviour changes (dotted local-parts, Unicode punctuation boundaries, case-insensitive full-tag matching). Those fixes will have corresponding new test cases, which are the fastest way to learn the new contract.

First use case to validate the upgrade: take a form or endpoint that accepts free text from users (contact form, profile bio, comment body) and push three fixtures through it — [email protected], an address with a trailing dot before the @ ([email protected]), and a paragraph containing visit www.example.com—then… with Unicode punctuation adjacent. Compare output before and after the bump.

Implementation Patterns

Sanitize/parse on output, not on ingest, for user-generated content. The 10.0.0 fixes are all "we now detect things correctly." If you sanitize at write time, every future parser fix requires a data migration to re-derive stored values. Storing raw text and running it through the package at render time means a composer update improves historical content for free. Reserve ingest-time processing for cases where you must index the extracted value (e.g. storing a normalized email for lookups).

Normalize config to canonical tag names. Because ignored-tag detection now matches full tag names case-insensitively, your config no longer needs defensive lowercase/mixed-case duplicates. Collapse entries like ['Script', 'script', 'SCRIPT'] down to ['script']. Do this in a config change, not in a service provider string-manipulation layer — the point of the fix is that the package handles it.

Treat the parser as a boundary service. Wrap calls in a thin app-level class (App\Support\ContentParser) rather than calling the package facade from controllers, jobs, and Blade partials. When a minor release shifts behaviour again, you have one place to add assertions or shims, and it's mockable in feature tests.

Backfill job for stricter email handling. The leading/trailing/repeated-dot rejection is a genuine behaviour narrowing — rows that were previously "valid" may now fail re-validation on edit. Pattern:

// one-off, chunked, idempotent
User::query()->whereNotNull('email')->chunkById(500, function ($users) {
    foreach ($users as $user) {
        if (! $validator->passes($user->email)) {
            Log::channel('data-quality')->warning('legacy invalid email', ['id' => $user->id]);
        }
    }
});

Report rather than silently null out — you want a list, not data loss.

Table-driven tests for the parser. The three fixes all live in edge cases, which are exactly what hand-written happy-path tests miss. Use a PHPUnit data provider with a fixture corpus: malformed emails (.user@, user.@, us..er@), text with www. abutting em dashes, curly quotes, CJK full-width punctuation, and tags in mixed case. Commit that corpus — it becomes your regression net for 10.1, 10.2, and beyond.

Integration tip for queues: if parsing happens in jobs or listeners, restart workers after the deploy (php artisan queue:restart). A rolling worker fleet running 9.x alongside 10.x web nodes will produce inconsistent parsed output in the same table.

Gotchas and Tips

• "Major" here mostly means platform support. Laravel 13 support means dropping Laravel 10/11 (and likely PHP 8.1/8.2). Confirm your CI matrix, your other first-party and third-party packages, and composer why-not laravel/framework 13.* before assuming the bump is trivial.
• Tag matching semantics changed, not just casing. "Matches full tag names" is the important half of that sentence. If you were relying on substring/prefix behaviour — an ignored-tag entry like div also suppressing divider, or a wildcard-ish entry — that stops working. Audit your config for short entries that were silently over-matching, and grep your tests for assertions that encoded the old loose behaviour.
• Stricter email validation is a silent failure mode. Previously-accepted addresses will now be rejected at the validation layer, which surfaces as a user-facing validation error with no clear cause. If you have a login or registration flow, test with real legacy data from production, not with fresh fixtures.
• www. after Unicode punctuation is fixed — so output changes. Anywhere you cached or stored rendered HTML with linkified text will now differ from freshly-parsed output. If you have a cache-busting or content-hash strategy keyed on parsed output, bump the namespace on deploy to avoid mixing pre- and post-fix markup.
• Use utf8mb4 and check collation. Unicode punctuation boundary handling only behaves if the database column can actually store those characters. utf8 (3-byte) columns silently truncate or mangle em dashes and curly quotes, which will make the new fix look broken.
• Debugging: reach for php artisan tinker with the package's parser directly rather than through your HTTP stack — instantiate it, feed a string, dd() the result. If a config change appears not to take effect, it's almost always a cached config (php artisan config:clear) or an OPcache-stale file in a long-running process.
• Extension points to prefer: config-driven tag lists and standard Laravel validation rules are stable across majors. Custom subclasses of package internals are not — those are what break on 11.x and 12.x. If you've subclassed a parser or validator class to work around the old loose tag matching, delete that workaround now.
• Pin the patch, read the minors. The three fixes in this release are the type of thing that gets follow-up edge-case patches (e.g. dot handling in quoted local-parts, www. at string start). Watch 10.0.x minors and re-run your fixture corpus on each.