Upgrading to 4.2.0

You can use composer to upgrade to CakePHP 4.2.0:

php composer.phar require --update-with-dependencies "cakephp/cakephp:4.2.*"

Deprecation Warnings

4.2 introduces a few deprecations. All of these features will continue for the duration of 4.x but will be removed in 5.0. See the migration guide.

What’s new in 4.2.0?

The migration guide has a complete list of what’s new in 4.2.0. We recommend you give that page a read when upgrading. A few highlights from 4.2.0 are:

• Full support for PHP8.
• Experimental support for a dependency injection container was added. The DI container enables you to have application dependencies injected into controller constructors, controller actions and command constructors.
• SQLServer driver now uses client-side buffers for results. This improves performance greatly.
• Cake\Http\Middleware\SessionCsrfProtectionMiddleware was added. Instead of storing CSRF tokens in a cookie, this middleware stores tokens in the session. This makes CSRF tokens user scoped and time based with the session, offering enhanced security over cookie based CSRF tokens.
• A new utility class Cake\Http\FlashMessage was added whose instance is available through ServerRequest::getFlash(). The class similar to the FlashComponent allows you to set flash messages from anywhere you have a request, making it useful in middleware.
• Table::subquery() and Query::subquery() were added. These methods lets you create query objects that don’t have automatic aliasing.
• Collations are now supported for string literals and IdentifierExpression.

Contributors to 4.2.0

Thank you to all tbe contributors that helped make 4.2 happen:

• ADmad
• Blaz
• chris cnizzardini
• Edgaras Janušauskas
• Eugene Ritter
• imo-tikuwa
• Juan Basso
• Mario Rothauer
• Mark Scherer
• Mark Story
• ndm2
• othercorey
• Ricardo Turella
• tanden
• tikuwa

As always, a huge thanks to all the community members that helped make this release happen by reporting issues and sending pull requests. 4.2.0 is a large release and would not have been possible without the community support and feedback.

Download a packaged release on github.