The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a guide to help you upgrade from a Laravel 4 based application to the latest version, Laravel 5. Author Younes Rafie walks you through each step of the process, providing sample code and explanations of the changes along the way.

Laravel 5 is already out, but the fear of change is taking everyone. We keep hearing people complaining about some radical changes. Like, why this new folder structure? Will my application break if I do a composer update? In this article, we’re going to look at how to migrate your existing Laravel 4 application to Laravel 5 and understand the new folder structure.

he starts by helping you get Larave 5 installed and working via Composer. He then makes updates to some configuration files for his sample application (it hooks into the Google Analytics API) including the Analytics connection information. He includes changes to the route handling and moving some files around to their new locations. He also mentions the re-installation of the Illuminate/Html package as it's no longer included in the base release.