Will update PHP 7.3 to 7.4 break anything?

Our application was running on laravel 5.5 and we updated to 7.5 and moved up from PHP 7.2 to 7.4.7 without any issues. I am newbie here but this is my experience.

@gthell Impossible to tell. Every application has different requirements.

Use something like Homestead or Docker to run your application in 7.4 and test it.

@coding_field Is it in production right?

@martinbean I can't find any good result googling about upgrading php in Laravel. Mostly it's only Laravel upgrade that usually break. But I would like to know the possibility also. I didn't write test for all function and it make it hard to test the whole application.

I believe PHP 7.3 -> 7.4 had mostly performance enhancements. To be safe do what @martinbean suggested, sandbox the project and test it out.

@gthell We are in production mode and we did not have issue with laravel application itself, but had other issues not related to PHP version. I think your best approach is to follow @martinbean steps and run multiple tests as well as manual testing to see if there are other issues that needs to be addressed.

Very soon on 26th of Nov 2020 PHP 8 will be released and it will be very interesting!! I guess there will lots of things to change that time not just for yourself, but for most of us here.

@alex_b Thank, I'll try doing in production.

@coding_field I check the PHP 8. it's great but introduce many breaking change. I hope all these Laravel package has backward compatibility when the do the upgrade (Most spatie package doesn't have backward compatibility)