Jordan Havard - Legacy to Laravel in 30 minutes - Laracon AU 2025

Jordan shares how his team turned a decade old multi tenant PHP beast into a modern Laravel application without stopping the business. From six tangled repositories and a single method Lumen API to a fully tested Laravel platform, he shows the patterns, tools and tests that made a safe migration possible. Along the way he covers how they won leadership buy in by focusing on business outcomes and performance wins, not just cleaner code. 📚 ## Chapters 01:10 Jordan’s PHP background, discovering Laravel through flight sim projects and joining Okfolio 03:00 The asbestos and hazardous materials problem space and what the Okfolio platform does today 06:30 From modern product back to reality - migrating a decade old multi tenant beast 07:00 Six repositories, client and common code bases, safety pages, admin app, inspector app and API 08:30 Inside the legacy PHP: God classes, homemade routing, and JavaScript built as PHP strings 10:00 No ORM, no DI and static configuration - why “just add tests before you refactor” is not so simple 11:40 The Lumen 6 API with everything in one controller method 13:20 Mobile app changes, Friday side quest and using Laravel Shift to convert Lumen to Laravel 15:35 Choosing gradual conversion and the strangler pattern over a risky big bang rewrite 16:20 Building the Laravel wrapper: new app, legacy folder, updated client code and a catch all route 17:15 The legacy controller, output buffering and letting the old app think nothing has changed 17:50 Replacing die calls with a legacy exit exception so Laravel can catch and return responses 18:25 Handling raw header redirects via a helper and exception to keep control inside Laravel 19:00 Iterating daily, drawing from Andrew Morgan’s article and standardising the legacy code 20:30 Establishing tests as the safety net so the team can refactor and deploy with confidence 22:00 New rhythm: features built in Laravel, fixes migrated when touching legacy, and the one way door 23:00 Every route now in Laravel, developer happiness and velocity up 24:25 Framing the migration for leadership around bugs, firefighting, support and the next decade 26:15 The slow legacy tables, timeouts and over fetching that hurt the customer experience 26:45 Laravel table demo: 100,000 rows in under a second, jazzed up UI and immediate buy in 27:45 Reflecting on “cheating” with Laravel’s tooling, models and pagination to deliver big wins 28:30 Final advice for teams sitting on legacy code and closing encouragement that the path is possible https://x.com/xi2066 https://laracon.au