🎉 WE DID IT! We finally got to v1. I almost don't believe it!
This is an awesome milestone. For a project that started as just an idea, to see it reach a truly stable place and support building powerful apps across all major platforms is just incredible.
NativePHP came to life just 2 years ago (April 1, 2023) when I shared on Twitter some early success in a side project that I'd been working on for a few months.
Taylor Otwell said: "Very interested".
Aaron Francis voted: "Yes please".
That was all the encouragement we needed!
Today, it's the best way for Laravel devs to build distributable desktop apps.
Go get it!
To get these updates, you simply need to update the dependency in your composer.json:
"nativephp/electron": "^1.0",
And then run composer update.
If you've been using any of the beta releases and want to set your minimum-stability back to stable, you can now do so.
You can find all the details about the releases on our Release Notes page.
In case you missed it, v1 drops support for Laravel 10 and PHP 8.1 and 8.2.
You will also need Node v22 as a minimum now.
It feels amazing to finally wrap everything we've been doing in a production-grade label.
Go tell all your friends! NativePHP is ready for primetime!
But, of course, we're far from finished!
What's next?
We've got more additions to the NativePHP docs coming in the next few days to wrap up some final missing pieces, we'll give these releases a couple of weeks to settle down (probably with a few patch releases here and there to mop up any bugs).
Also, check out our Kitchen Sink app, which is now published. It's a pretty neat little demonstration of many of the things you can do with NativePHP for desktop today and we'll be adding more to it as time goes by.
Then we'll be spending some time working out what features make sense to build next for desktop. We've already got a few ideas, but if there's anything you're especially keen for, please make it known in the Discussions, either by voting for existing Ideas or creating new ones.
Beyond just the libraries, there's Zephpyr, the build service for NativePHP, which is already in early access. It's open to sponsors and NativePHP for mobile EAP members right now and we're steadily rolling it out to more and more users who are helping us with testing, bug hunting and feedback.
Think of Zephpyr as the "Laravel Forge" for NativePHP apps. We're focusing on NativePHP for desktop support right now, but we'll be adding support for mobile apps too with plenty more features over the coming months.
We're going to make building and distributing your NativePHP apps dead easy. Zephpyr will be generally available via subscription in the coming months.
Folks who join the Zephpyr early access now will get preferential discounts at launch. Or you can join the waitlist via zephpyr.com for a more modest launch day discount.
Thanks
Huge thanks are in order for the core contributors. Without these fine gents, v1 certainly would not have happened so soon!
Thank you @SRWieZ @gwleuverink and @PeteBishwhip 🙏🏼
Thank you all for your tireless efforts over the past few weeks pushing this forward; countless hours testing, building, bundling, and publishing apps; making, reviewing and merging PRs; triaging issues and just being awesome on Discord; waiting hours and hours for Apple notarization (and also for a new baby—congrats Willem!)
Thanks to all contributors.
And thanks to all our sponsors for supporting this monumental effort, but especially:
I really hope you enjoy building apps with the very best version of NativePHP yet.
P.S. I love seeing what you're building, so please come share with us all over on Discord!