Upgrading Laravel 12 to 13 with some deps without using Shift

Certainly! Here’s a safe and practical approach for upgrading from Laravel 12 to 13 without using Laravel Shift, considering your posted dependencies.

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1. Review Laravel 13 Upgrade Guide First

• Check the Laravel 13 Upgrade Guide for all breaking changes and necessary manual steps.
• Check for breaking changes in any packages you use, especially spatie/laravel-permission, maatwebsite/excel, etc.

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2. Check Package Compatibility

• Before upgrading Laravel, verify that ALL your current dependencies support Laravel 13.
  Good commands for this:

  composer why-not laravel/framework 13.*
  

  and check the GitHub repos/changelogs of key packages for Laravel 13 support.

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3. Update composer.json

Change:

"laravel/framework": "^12.0",

to:

"laravel/framework": "^13.0",

For extra safety, you might bump related official packages (tinker, sanctum, scout, etc) to their latest versions that support Laravel 13.

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4. Run Composer Update

This is the command to upgrade your dependencies:

composer update

If Composer can't resolve dependencies, you may need to increment some package versions in your composer.json or temporarily remove a package that doesn't support Laravel 13 yet.

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5. Manually Apply Upgrade Steps

Follow the official Upgrade Guide:

• Check if your app uses any features that have changed or been removed.
• Check for any config file changes/new config. You can compare your config files with the stub versions using laravel-shift.com/compare.
• Run tests!

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6. Test Thoroughly

• Run your automated tests:

  php artisan test
  

• Test your site in a staging/dev environment if possible, not production.

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7. Deploy

• Once you’ve verified locally/staging, deploy to production.

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Example Full Command Series

# Backup your project (highly recommended)
git commit -am "Backup before Laravel 13 upgrade"

# Bump your Laravel version in composer.json
# (use any text editor)

# Try the update
composer update

# If you run into a dependency error, check which package is blocking Laravel 13

composer why-not laravel/framework 13.*
# Adjust offending package versions as needed

# Run migrations, clear cache, etc
php artisan migrate
php artisan config:cache
php artisan route:clear
php artisan view:clear

# Run tests
php artisan test

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Summary of Things to Watch Out For

• Carefully review Laravel 13 upgrade notes.
• Vendor packages may lag — check for Laravel 13 support across your dependencies.
• If you hit unsolvable dependency issues, you may need to update or temporarily remove a package.
• Test before deploying!

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You do not need Shift for this upgrade. It’s mostly a composer update plus the manual steps in the upgrade guide.

If you hit any specific errors during composer update, paste them here and I can help debug!

Let me know if you need advice for a specific package in your list.