Laravel Follow Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Laravel 13 upgrade sequencing. Version 6.0.0 sets a hard floor at Laravel 13 and PHP 8.3, so this package's upgrade path is now coupled to your platform upgrade. It becomes a forcing function and a dependency to schedule, not a standalone decision.
• Build vs. buy for framework-adjacent functionality. A maintainer shipping a major release in lockstep with a new Laravel major (including testbench/PHPUnit/tooling alignment) is a signal of active maintenance. That weighs in favor of buying/ adopting rather than building and owning this capability internally.
• Roadmap timing. If your roadmap includes a Laravel 13 migration this cycle, this package is viable now. If you are staying on Laravel 11/12 for the next two or more quarters, 6.x is not adoptable and you should pin to the previous major or defer evaluation.
• Vendor and dependency risk review. The major-version bump is a breaking change for consumers on older frameworks. Treat it as a planned migration item with a pinned-version fallback, not a silent composer update.
• Contributor and support model assessment. The addition of AGENTS.md indicates the project is standardizing AI-assisted contribution workflows. Relevant if you depend on upstream responsiveness, fork, or contribute patches.

When to Consider This Package

Consider it when:

• You are on, or committed to, Laravel 13 and can meet PHP 8.3 as a minimum in production and CI.
• You want a dependency that tracks the current Laravel major rather than lagging it, and you value a maintainer who updates tooling and test infrastructure alongside framework support.
• You are starting greenfield work where the version floor costs you nothing.
• You have a dependency upgrade process that can absorb a major-version bump with a changelog review and a pinned fallback.

Look elsewhere or defer when:

• You are on Laravel 11 or 12, or on PHP 8.2 or older anywhere in the runtime path (including long-lived staging or batch environments). 6.x will not install.
• You need a package with an explicit long-term-support or wide-version-range guarantee. This release narrows support to a single framework major, which is a deliberate trade-off but a real constraint for slow-moving estates.
• You require a documented feature rationale before adoption. These notes describe a compatibility release — platform floor, tooling, contributor docs — and contain no functional changes to evaluate on merit.
• You cannot yet verify the migration surface. The notes do not enumerate API or behavioral breaks for consumers; confirm against the package's upgrade guide and changelog before committing to the bump.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For executives: Version 6.0.0 is a compatibility release, not a feature release. It moves the package to Laravel 13 and PHP 8.3 and updates the maintainer's test and build tooling. There is no new capability to sell internally, and no cost if we are already on the current framework. The decision it forces is a platform one: adopt only as part of a Laravel 13 upgrade, otherwise stay pinned to the prior major. Risk is low and well-bounded — the package is actively maintained against the current framework release.

For engineering: Treat this as a breaking change gated on runtime version. Confirm Laravel 13 and PHP 8.3 across app, queue workers, and CI images before bumping; pin the previous major in the interim. The tooling refresh (testbench, PHPUnit) means our own test harness may need matching updates. The new AGENTS.md standardizes AI-assisted contributions upstream, which is worth knowing if we plan to submit patches. Validate the actual consumer-facing breaking changes against the changelog and upgrade guide — these notes cover the platform floor only.