Laravel and its other first-party packages follow Semantic Versioning. Major framework releases are released every six months (February and August), while minor and patch releases may be released as often as every week. Minor and patch releases should never contain breaking changes.
When referencing the Laravel framework or its components from your application or package, you should always use a version constraint such as ^7.0, since major releases of Laravel do include breaking changes. However, we strive to always ensure you may update to a new major release in one day or less.
For LTS releases, such as Laravel 6, bug fixes are provided for 2 years and security fixes are provided for 3 years. These releases provide the longest window of support and maintenance. For general releases, bug fixes are provided for 6 months and security fixes are provided for 1 year. For all additional libraries, including Lumen, only the latest release receives bug fixes. In addition, please review the database versions supported by Laravel.
| Version | Release | Bug Fixes Until | Security Fixes Until |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5.5 (LTS) | August 30th, 2017 | August 30th, 2019 | August 30th, 2020 |
| 5.6 | February 7th, 2018 | August 7th, 2018 | February 7th, 2019 |
| 5.7 | September 4th, 2018 | March 4th, 2019 | September 4th, 2019 |
| 5.8 | February 26th, 2019 | August 26th, 2019 | February 26th, 2020 |
| 6 (LTS) | September 3rd, 2019 | September 3rd, 2021 | September 3rd, 2022 |
Release notes will be placed here.