All three are good choices. Our team of two has been maintaining 9 NOT small Laravel applications ( thousands of lines of application code ) for years. I gotta say it checks off everything on your TLDR; list. Straightforward upgrades, no blockers to being on most recent PHP, fabulous stability, and maximum ease of development for everything from a two page site to a beefy Enterprise web app. Again you probably are in good shape with Slim or Symfony as well and ultimately I think you should go with the one that you have the most fun using but I think Laravel would be an excellent choice that will make your work easy for years to come.
We do for side projects but for work we can't let stuff out of the network per company security policy so we do manual upgrades on all our projects and packages every year. Takes about a week for one of us, it's really not bad once you've done it once. His upgrade guides are very thorough and we've never had a problem that wasn't addressed by the community within 24hrs or so, usually some obscure function signature that got changed that's used by a very small portion of the total install base and we just happen to be one of them. Having robust test coverage saves us from deploying it if it's not working. Almost never an issue on small projects that are using basic Eloquent features. But Shift is great if you can use it.
Oh, sorry, no, that's 10 apps and 12 private packages all in a few days for all of them. The individual migrations are maybe an hour max. With Shift it's even faster.
All three are good choices. Our team of two has been maintaining 9 NOT small Laravel applications ( thousands of lines of application code ) for years. I gotta say it checks off everything on your TLDR; list. Straightforward upgrades, no blockers to being on most recent PHP, fabulous stability, and maximum ease of development for everything from a two page site to a beefy Enterprise web app. Again you probably are in good shape with Slim or Symfony as well and ultimately I think you should go with the one that you have the most fun using but I think Laravel would be an excellent choice that will make your work easy for years to come.
That's really good to hear actually. Thank you for sharing your experience!
Do you use Shift for your updates?
We do for side projects but for work we can't let stuff out of the network per company security policy so we do manual upgrades on all our projects and packages every year. Takes about a week for one of us, it's really not bad once you've done it once. His upgrade guides are very thorough and we've never had a problem that wasn't addressed by the community within 24hrs or so, usually some obscure function signature that got changed that's used by a very small portion of the total install base and we just happen to be one of them. Having robust test coverage saves us from deploying it if it's not working. Almost never an issue on small projects that are using basic Eloquent features. But Shift is great if you can use it.
See that's a big concern of mine. If each upgrade takes a week. If I have 6 projects, that's a month & a half for every release. Yikes.
Oh, sorry, no, that's 10 apps and 12 private packages all in a few days for all of them. The individual migrations are maybe an hour max. With Shift it's even faster.
Oh, thank god! LOL