In a recent post Dejan Angelov shares the process he went through to upgrade an application to Laravel 5, yet to be released (at least at the time of this post).

Over the past weeks, Taylor introduced many great changes and new features that we’ll be able to use in the new version, firstly numbered 4.3 and later 5. According to the framework’s six month release cycle, it should had hit stable late this month or in early December. Because of that, I started to play with it and to apply the changes to make my application use it.

However, a couple of days ago, Taylor wrote a blog post on the Laravel’s blog saying that because of the importance of this release, the release date will be postponed to January. Considering this, everything you’ll read here MUST NOT be applied to applications that are currently in production.

He starts with some of the major differences, including changes in the dependencies required and the removal of the "start.php" file for bootstrapping the application. He talks about the changes in startup and shutdown as well as autoloading. He looks at directory structure changes and the addition of a base namespace. He then gets into how to fix these issues, one at a time, including code and configuration changes that need to be made. This includes updates to the facades, changes for middleware, environment configuration, pagination and routing. There's lots of other changes happening with Laravel 5, so be sure to check out the full post if you're interested in the steps you might need to take when this latest version is released.