If you’ve been monitoring the recent changes to the Laravel repository, you’ll know that as of Laravel 5.5 the artisan optimize command has been deprecated. In version 5.6 however, it is being removed altogether. Read on for essential information and for potential consequences.

What does the optimise command do?

In a nutshell it takes a bunch of commonly used classes and compiles them down to a single file so that the number of file includes per request is kept to a minimum. If you’re curious how this works, you can see the code here. Read more →