Migrating to Laravel 5: New Directory Structure and .env

Laravel 5 shipped its stable release last month, and my first reaction was: familiar, yet completely different. I had built several projects with Laravel 4 — the directory structure, config files, app/models, app/controllers — all of it was baked into muscle memory. Opening a fresh Laravel 5 project, I had a distinct “wait, did everything move?” moment.

A bit of research made it clear that the changes weren’t a random reshuffling. This was a deliberate, well-considered restructuring. In this post I’ll walk through the most important changes and how I adapted to them.

Key directory structure changes

In Laravel 4, application code lived under app/ and looked like this:

app/
  controllers/
  models/
  views/
  filters.php
  routes.php

Laravel 5 changed this significantly. The models/ and controllers/ directories are gone. Instead, app/ is left open for you to organize however you like, following PSR-4 autoloading conventions.

app/
  Http/
    Controllers/
    Middleware/
    Requests/
  Providers/
  User.php

It might look messy at first glance, but it’s actually more flexible. You can keep your models under app/Models/ or directly inside app/ — the framework doesn’t dictate a folder structure; that’s your call.

routes.php is now at app/Http/routes.php. Everything HTTP-related is grouped under Http/ — a sensible decision.

.env file and configuration management

This is my favorite change in Laravel 5. Previously, files like app/config/database.php and app/config/mail.php contained server credentials directly. You’d create separate subdirectories for each environment (app/config/local/, app/config/production/).

Laravel 5 drops that approach entirely and embraces .env. A .env file sits at the project root and holds sensitive configuration as plain text.

APP_ENV=local
APP_DEBUG=true
APP_KEY=SomeRandomKey

DB_HOST=localhost
DB_DATABASE=homestead
DB_USERNAME=homestead
DB_PASSWORD=secret

This file is added to .gitignore and never committed to version control. Each developer maintains their own .env. On the production server, the same variables are set either as environment variables or in a server-side .env. Config files now read these values via calls like env('DB_HOST', 'localhost').

With this setup, database passwords and API keys never end up in git history. In my opinion, this is exactly the right move.

Middleware

In Laravel 4, before/after request logic was handled by something called “filters.” In Laravel 5, that concept is renamed to middleware and lives in app/Http/Middleware/. The underlying idea is the same; only the name and location changed. This shift was made as groundwork for PSR-7 compatibility.

Service providers and application bootstrapping

Laravel 4 had startup files under app/start/ — things like global.php and artisan.php. Those are gone. Everything you need to bootstrap your application is now managed through service providers. You register your own providers in the providers array inside config/app.php.

It felt like overhead at first, but the more service providers I wrote, the more I appreciated how organized this approach is.

Migrations and the command line

Not much changed here — artisan migrate still works. But artisan commands have been expanded. Commands like php artisan make:controller, php artisan make:model, and php artisan make:middleware generate files in the correct directory using the correct stub. A small convenience that compounds quickly over time.

How long did the migration take?

Rather than porting an existing Laravel 4 project in-place, I chose to start a fresh Laravel 5 project and move the code over piece by piece. There’s no automated migration path; the architectural changes require manual adaptation.

Starting fresh produced a cleaner result. The migration took a few days, but in the end I had a tidier codebase and had picked up solid habits like properly using .env.

Laravel 5 looks like a breaking change at first glance, but it’s genuinely a step in the right direction. A few days of patience is all it takes.