Laracon EU 2025

What a blast the last couple of days have been!

This was my second time at Laracon EU and it didn't disappoint. A big focus of this year's conference was showcasing the incredible work the Laravel team have been working on with their new products Laravel Cloud and Nightwatch. It's clear that the Laravel team are super passionate about their craft, and this is reflected in the quality of the products.

I was also lucky enough to be invited to a VIP dinner with the Laravel crew including Taylor Otwell, plus some other members of the community. We were given an exclusive peek into Laravel Cloud and Nightwatch, as well as having our questions answered.

Here's a rundown of highlights and key takeaways:

Taylor Otwell gave a live demo of Laravel Cloud on stage. It was super exciting to see how quickly and effortlessly we can deploy our Laravel applications with Cloud.

Cloud is perfect for applications of any size. Built-in hibernation functionality means you're not paying for quiet periods on your small-scale applications. And for larger applications, Cloud gives us complete control on size and auto-scaling rules; even for background processes.

Jess Archer showcased Laravel's first party monitoring tool, Nightwatch. Nightwatch gives you all the insights you need for your application to ensure it's running smoothly. And the team have made great efforts to ensure that tracking performance has minimal impact on performance itself.

Nightwatch not only gives you insights, but it's also the place to see any exceptions that occurred on your application, assign them to a team member, and mark them as resolved.

David Hill talked to us about the design decisions taken at Laravel to bring us a cohesive ecosystem.

He also showcased the new Laravel website, which gives great focus on how Laravel's first party and community packages make it the no-brainer framework for any project.

Simon Hamp showed us what he's been tirelessly working away at, bringing PHP applications to iOS.

NativePHP for iOS allows you to write PHP code, run native Swift code, and compile it to a native iOS application.

Michi Hoffman gave us an incredible live-demonstration of how to create a PHP extension.

Sometimes we need to extend the functionality of PHP and expose an underlying C library - and that's what we can do with PHP extensions.

It's a topic that can feel daunting due to the lack of good documentation, but Michi's talk showed us that it's not something completely out of reach.

LaraconEU 2025 was another fantastic conference, and a really exciting start to the new era of Laravel. I can't wait to be back next year!