Laravel 12 Released: New Starter Kits and a Deliberately Small Upgrade

Laravel 12, the framework's 2025 major release, arrived on February 24, 2025. Unlike releases that reshape large parts of the framework, Laravel 12 was designed to be a low-friction upgrade: its headline additions are a new generation of application starter kits, while the underlying framework changes are intentionally small.

A deliberately minimal major release

Laravel follows an annual major-release cadence, roughly every first quarter, and the team used the Laravel 12 cycle to prioritise stability over churn. The official release notes describe it as a relatively minor maintenance release focused on upgrading upstream dependencies, with the explicit goal that most applications can move from Laravel 11 to 12 without changing application code. For teams that have been burned by painful framework upgrades elsewhere, that restraint is the story.

New application starter kits

The most visible change is a new set of starter kits for React, Svelte, Vue and Livewire. The React, Svelte and Vue kits are built on Inertia 2, TypeScript, shadcn/ui and Tailwind CSS, while the Livewire kits use the Tailwind-based Flux UI component library together with Laravel Volt. All of them wire up Laravel's built-in authentication, so a new project starts with login, registration, password reset and email verification already in place.

Optional WorkOS AuthKit authentication

Each starter kit also ships in a variant powered by WorkOS AuthKit, which adds social authentication, passkeys and single sign-on. This is optional: teams that prefer Laravel's own authentication can use the standard kits. The WorkOS route is aimed at applications that want enterprise-style identity features without building them from scratch.

What it means for existing projects

Because Laravel 12 keeps breaking changes to a minimum, the upgrade is mostly a dependency bump for existing applications. The tradeoff of the new starter kits is that Laravel Breeze and Laravel Jetstream stop receiving further updates, so new projects are steered toward the new kits. Existing Breeze or Jetstream apps keep working, but teams starting fresh should evaluate the new options.

Support timeline

Per Laravel's published support policy, Laravel 12 supports PHP 8.2 through 8.5, receives bug fixes into August 2026 and security fixes into February 2027. As always, using a version constraint such as ^12.0 is the recommended way to depend on the framework.

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See also: our guide to 30 free and open-source PC apps.

Sources

• Laravel 12 release notes and support policy (official)
• Laravel starter kit documentation (official)

Published date reflects the original event date (2025-02-24). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.