Upgrading to 4.5.0

You can use composer to upgrade to CakePHP 4.5.0:

php composer.phar require --update-with-dependencies "cakephp/cakephp:4.5.*"

Deprecation Warnings

4.5 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 4.5.0?

The migration guide has a complete list of what’s new in 4.5.0. We recommend you give that page a read when upgrading. A few highlights from 4.5.0 are:

• bin/cake cache clear_group <name> was added. This command gives a CLI interface to clearing a specific cache group.
• ComponentRegistry is now automatically added to your application’s DI container.
• Controller::addViewClasses() was added. This method lets you build a controller’s view classes programatically.
• Database and ORM connections now support read and write connection roles. Connection roles let you scale an application up by using read-replicas. When defining connections, roles can be configured with read and write keys in the connection config that override the shared config.
• New methods were added to queries to select the read or write connection role to be used.
• ModelAwareTrait::fetchModel() was added. This method works similar to loadModel() but does not set the model as an attribute.
• The development error page design has been improved. It now renders chained exceptions and makes navigating stack traces easier as each frame can be collapsed individually.
• Console exception messages now include stack traces for chained exceptions.
• EntityTrait::$_hasAllowsNull was added. This property allows you to incrementally opt-in to a breaking change present in 5.x for EntityTrait::has().
• View::addHelper() was added. This method compliments addBehavior() and addComponent().

Contributors to 4.5.0

Thank you to all the contributors that helped make 4.5 happen:

• ADmad
• Alejandro Ibarra
• Brian French
• Chris Nizzardini
• Jaro Varga
• Jose Daian
• Kevin Pfeifer
• Lars Ebert
• leon.schaub
• Marcelo Rocha
• Mark Scherer
• Mark Story
• Matthias Wirtz
• othercorey
• Roland Waldner
• wowDAS Ing. Markus Ramšak

As always, a huge thanks to all the community members that helped make this release happen by reporting issues and sending pull requests. 4.5.0 is a large release and would not have been possible without the community support and feedback.

What’s Next

With both 5.0 and 4.5 shipped the core team’s focus will be primarily on CakePHP 5.x. Future 4.x releases will be primarily community driven. Feature and bugfix releases for 4.x will continue until September 2025. Security fixes will continue for 4.x until September 2026.

The roadmap for 5.x is still under development. We’re interested in making the upgrade from 4.5.0 to 5.0 a smooth one, and would appreciate any feedback you have on upgrade difficulties. Please open an issue and get the discussion started.

Download a packaged release on github.