Laravel 6 and What LTS Really Means: Versioning Strategy

Laravel 6, expected to ship in September 2019, will carry the LTS label. My first reaction when I heard this was “what new features does it bring?” — but after sitting with it for a while, I realized that was the wrong question. The real question is: how does a framework’s versioning strategy influence project decisions?

In the Laravel 5.x series, releases came every six months. Each release brought new features, but also breaking changes. If you were on 5.4 and wanted to move to 5.8, that was no small undertaking. LTS releases work differently: for 6.x, two years of bug fixes and three years of security updates are guaranteed.

What LTS gives you

A stability guarantee. An LTS release means the API of that major framework version won’t change beneath you. The team doesn’t have to revisit “which version are we staying on?” for several years.

Easier sell in enterprise projects. Adopting a technology in a large organization means answering the question “how many years will it be supported?” from the layers above you. A “monthly release” cadence doesn’t answer that question. The LTS label gives a concrete answer.

Lower maintenance cost. Framework upgrades require significant testing and adaptation time. With LTS, you can spread that cost across three years.

What you give up: speed

LTS comes at a price. Laravel moves fast, and every release genuinely brings useful things. Staying on LTS means you can’t use new features the moment they land. That trade-off has to be accepted consciously.

The way I frame this equation is: how long will the project live?

For a project delivered in six months and then closed out, LTS barely makes sense — it’ll finish within one or two release cycles anyway. But for an enterprise application that will be maintained for three, five, or ten years, LTS is far more sensible.

Semver and semantic versioning

Laravel 6 brings another change in its version numbering: semantic versioning (semver) is now applied properly. Previously, minor versions in 5.x could contain breaking changes — which is not standard semver behavior.

The semver rules are:

• Major version (6 → 7): may contain breaking changes.
• Minor version (6.1 → 6.2): new features, backward compatible.
• Patch version (6.1.1 → 6.1.2): bug fixes, backward compatible.

This might look like a small change, but it matters for dependency management. A constraint like ^6.0 now genuinely means “the 6.x family, no breaking changes” — and you can actually rely on that.

The PHP version dependency

Laravel 6 ships with a PHP 7.2 minimum requirement. PHP 5 support had already been dropped long ago; the 7.x family is now the baseline. This means that when thinking long-term, you need to account for the minimum requirement levers between the framework and the language itself.

Practical decision: when to choose LTS?

The filter I use:

• If the project lifespan is over 2 years → LTS is a serious option.
• If the team doesn’t have the bandwidth to track framework updates → LTS.
• If you need to use every new feature immediately, or active development is ongoing → stay on the latest release.

Thinking about a framework’s versioning strategy can feel like “administrative detail, not software engineering.” But in real projects, these decisions are felt for years. Locking a project into a version that’s painful to maintain — or buckling under the weight of unnecessary upgrades — both have real costs.