In this new post to his site Joe Ferguson takes a look at Laravel Shift, an automated service that makes it easier to upgrade your Laravel-based application quickly.

I’ve had an eye on LaravelShift.com since it first made it’s way across my twitter feed some time ago. I’ve also had the pleasure of meeting and talking with it’s creator Jason McCreary at a few conferences over the past year. I think it’s really awesome when community members are able to take a product to market that not only scratches their own itch, but can provide value to the rest of the community as well.

[...] I built NerdsAreDrinking on Laravel 5.1 because that was the current version at the time. We have seen two more release since: 5.2 and 5.3. The upgrade process isn’t terrible however there is a lot you may need to take into account. Rather than upgrade from 5.1 to 5.2 and then 5.2 to 5.3 I decided to use Laravel Shift to do the 5.1 to 5.2 upgrade for me.

Joe then talks some about his experience using the service and was impressed at the speed of the service to create the required Pull Request for the update. He includes a link to the PR so you can see what the upgrade looks like too. He feels like the money spent (around $11 USD) was well invested and would definitely use the service again.