Everything we announced at Laracon US 2026 | Laravel - The clean stack for Artisans and agents

Every Laravel framework and Cloud announcement from Laracon US 2026, including Laravel LSP, Inertia DevTools, managed queues, and scale-to-zero.
The Laracon US keynote covered a lot of ground this year.
Here's everything you can do right now:
Other highlights include Framework updates such as image manipulation and Blade support in Laravel Pint. On the Cloud side, we walked through MySQL scale-to-zero, managed queues, Private Cloud updates, and more.
Keep reading to learn more about everything we shipped.
Laravel's new image manipulation API gives you a fluent, chainable way to resize images, convert formats, set device pixel ratio, and output the result directly to the browser, all from PHP, without reaching for a separate image library.
The Laravel VS Code extension has quietly become one of the most useful tools in a Laravel developer's editor: autocomplete for routes, views, and config, inline documentation, and more. Until now, all of that lived inside one extension for a single editor.
Laravel LSP generalizes that same functionality into a Language Server Protocol implementation, so any editor that speaks LSP, including NeoVim, Zed, and Sublime Text, gets the same autocomplete and navigation features that VS Code users already have. Point your editor at the Laravel LSP, and it works the same way, regardless of which editor you use.
If you've used Vue DevTools, Inertia DevTools will feel familiar. Inertia DevTools is a Chrome extension built specifically for Inertia applications that shows you every network request your app makes, how Inertia's headers are being set, and what props are hydrated on each page.
Instead of digging through the network tab to figure out why a prop isn't showing up the way you expect, Inertia DevTools gives you a dedicated view into how data flows between your Laravel backend and your Inertia frontend, end-to-end.
Node developers have had npx for years: a way to run a package without installing it in your project. PHP developers haven't had an equivalent, so we took a dormant open-source tool called CPX and rebuilt it.
With CPX, running cpx laravel/pint executes Pint against your project without adding it to your composer.json. You can alias commands so cpx pint works instead of the full package name, run local scripts that pull in dependencies your project doesn't have, and even execute a script directly from a GitHub Gist URL.
Building a Laravel package used to mean assembling your own skeleton: config files, migrations, routes, translations, tests, and CI workflows, all wired up by hand. The Laravel package skeleton is a GitHub template that already has everything in place.
Clone it and run the interactive setup script, answering a few questions and selecting the features your package plans to utilize. The script removes anything you didn't ask for and can even create the GitHub repository for you, so you can start writing package code within minutes instead of hours. A lightweight laravel package CLI command builds on the same skeleton for a concise way to spin up a fresh package.
Most Laravel projects run their local dev processes through composer dev, which wraps npx concurrently to run your server, queue worker, and asset builder side-by-side. It works, but adding or removing a process meant editing your composer.json scripts by hand.
You can also register additional commands from a service provider like Reverb or Stripe's CLI webhook listener (see code above)
The artisan dev command moves that configuration to the PHP side. You register your dev commands in your app service provider, assign each one a color (optional), and packages like Laravel Reverb or Laravel Horizon can register their own commands automatically the moment they're installed.
You control which processes run by chaining only() and except() methods when you register them, and you can inspect what's registered with the --only and --except flags on artisan dev. Under the hood, it uses proc_open to replace the PHP process directly, so there's no extra runtime overhead compared to the old npx concurrently approach.
Managing everything between your HTML <head> tags, Open Graph images, canonical links, progressive web apps metadata, descriptions, has traditionally meant scattering <meta> tags across your Blade views by hand. The new head tag API gives you a fluent, PHP-side way to configure everything in one place.
Set defaults globally for your entire application, then override them at the route or view level wherever you need more specific behavior.
Laravel Pint already formats your PHP files with an opinionated, zero-config setup built on PHP-CS-Fixer. Pint now extends that same formatting to your Blade templates, so your views get the same consistent, automatic formatting as the rest of your codebase.
Artisan doctor runs a set of health checks against your Laravel application: is your APP_KEY set, does your PHP version match what Composer expects, are your required extensions installed, and is your environment configuration complete? Where it can fix an issue automatically, it does. Where it can't, it tells you exactly what's wrong.
Packages can register their own diagnostic checks, so a package with specific configuration requirements can plug directly into artisan doctor and surface its own health checks alongside the framework's. It's also a natural last step for AI coding agents: after making changes, an agent can run artisan doctor as a final sanity check before considering a task done.
Holding a lock for a long-running task has always meant a trade-off: too short a duration risks duplicate work, too long a duration leaves a stale lock behind if the job fails partway through. Refreshable locks now give you a third option: take a short lock, do one unit of work, and call $lock->refresh() to extend it before it expires.
You can pass a custom number of seconds to refresh(), or leave it blank to reuse the lock's original duration. If the job fails, the lock expires in seconds instea