Should I update my Laravel 4 application to Laravel 5 or create a new Laravel 5 application

Question

I've got a couple of Laravel 4 applications that I want to upgrade to Laravel 5. Normally I would use the Laravel docs upgrade guide to achieve an upgrade to the next version.

But earlier today I read a blog post from Matt Stauffer stating the following:

Taylor has said publicly that he thinks the better process is actually to start from scratch and copy your code in.

So my question is what should I do, should I update my Laravel 4 application to Laravel 5 or create a new Laravel 5 application and copy/port my whole codebase into it?

Answer 1

The official documentation recommends creating a project from scratch:

The recommended method of upgrading is to create a new Laravel 5.0 install and then to copy your 4.2 site's unique application files into the new application.

from http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/upgrade#upgrade-5.0

To be honest, from my experience, it is quite difficult to upgrade to 5.0. There are lots of namespace issues if you already have used them throughout your projects so prepare for a lot of work.

Update

Even though this is not directly related, if you do plan to upgrade to Laravel 5.0, take note that the HTML and Form helpers are now gone and moved into a separate package: http://laravelcollective.com/docs/5.0/html