Elevating Legacy: A Case Study on the migration from Laravel 4 to 9
summary
A real migration story: move a Laravel 4.2 codebase to Laravel 9 and make it live on 24 Feb 2023, remove dead features via tombstones instrumentation, automate many edits with Rector (about 359 rules then plus custom rules), raise type coverage toward 100% type coverage so renames are safe, keep ~60–70% functional tests and add smoke tests, avoid sweeping refactors, break work into smaller steps, and prefer minimal changes that get the app running before cosmetic upgrades.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Laravel upgrade journey
- 1:54Code prehab for upgrades
- 10:24Dead code removal and type coverage
- 16:34Upgrade planning tools
- 23:15Breaking upgrade into tasks
- 26:49Custom Rector rules
- 38:05Executing upgrade steps
- 38:46Decoupling business logic
- 44:22Q&A
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