Laravel 13.36: validation rule builders, Vitess olap() and sticky queue flushes

Your Form Request is a wall of strings like 'required_with:phone,email', your PlanetScale report dies at 100,000 rows, and your queue workers quietly read from the primary all day. Laravel 13.36 has a fix for each, and none of them change how your app behaves until you opt in.

What’s new at a glance#

Validation rule builders for (almost) every rule#

Laravel already had objects for the complex rules: Rule::unique(), Rule::enum(), Password::min(), Rule::date(). Everything else was a string you had to remember and spell right. In 13.36, Rule gets a static method for nearly every remaining rule, so your IDE can autocomplete them and jump to their code.

public function rules(): array
{
    return [
        'account_type' => ['required', 'in:personal,business'],
        'company' => ['missing_if:account_type,personal'],
        'email' => ['required_without:phone', 'email'],
        'phone' => ['required_without:email', 'regex:/^\+?[0-9 ]{7,15}$/'],
        'password' => ['required', 'confirmed:password_repeat'],
        'server_ip' => ['nullable', 'ipv4'],
        'terms' => ['accepted'],
    ];
}

use Illuminate\Validation\Rule;

public function rules(): array
{
    return [
        'account_type' => [Rule::required(), Rule::in(['personal', 'business'])],
        'company' => [Rule::missingIf('account_type', 'personal')],
        'email' => [Rule::requiredWithout('phone'), Rule::email()],
        'phone' => [Rule::requiredWithout('email'), Rule::regex('/^\+?[0-9 ]{7,15}$/')],
        'password' => [Rule::required(), Rule::confirmed()->customField('password_repeat')],
        'server_ip' => [Rule::nullable(), Rule::ip()->version(4)],
        'terms' => [Rule::accepted()],
    ];
}

Both versions validate exactly the same way: we ran the same payloads through both and got the same errors. Pick the style your team reads faster.

What you get#

There are three kinds of new methods:

Rule::date() also gained equals(), so Rule::date()->equals('2026-10-14') gives you date_equals next to before(), after() and friends.

Commas in values are finally safe#

The rule objects are handed to the validator as arrays, not glued into a string. So a value that contains a comma (or a regex with a |) no longer needs manual quoting:

(string) Rule::presentIf('mode', 'a,b'); // present_if:mode,"a,b"

Validator::make(['mode' => 'a,b'], ['note' => [Rule::presentIf('mode', 'a,b')]])->fails(); // true
Validator::make(['mode' => 'a'], ['note' => [Rule::presentIf('mode', 'a,b')]])->passes(); // true

With the string 'present_if:mode,a,b', the same rule would match a or b. That’s the kind of bug you only find in production.

php artisan tinker --execute="dump((string) Illuminate\Validation\Rule::requiredWith('phone', 'email'), (string) Illuminate\Validation\Rule::ip()->version(6))"

You should see required_with:phone,email and ipv6. Your Vue side doesn’t change at all: errors still arrive in form.errors with the same keys and messages.

DB::olap() for big PlanetScale and Vitess queries#

PlanetScale (and Vitess in general) runs queries in OLTP mode, which caps how many rows a query can touch. Large reports need OLAP mode. Before, you had to switch it yourself and remember to switch back:

try {
    DB::statement("set workload = 'olap'");

    $revenue = Order::query()
        ->selectRaw("customer_id, date_format(created_at, '%Y-%m') as month, sum(total) as revenue")
        ->groupBy('customer_id', 'month')
        ->get();
} finally {
    DB::statement("set workload = 'oltp'");
}

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;

$revenue = DB::olap(fn () => Order::query()
    ->selectRaw("customer_id, date_format(created_at, '%Y-%m') as month, sum(total) as revenue")
    ->where('created_at', '>=', now()->subYears(3))
    ->groupBy('customer_id', 'month')
    ->get()
);

The old version had two bugs hiding in it. DB::statement() only switched the write connection, so with read replicas your SELECT still ran as OLTP. And forgetting the finally leaked OLAP mode into the next job or request.

olap() sets the workload on both the read and write PDO, returns whatever your callback returns and always switches back to oltp. It’s a method on MySqlConnection, so DB::olap() uses your default connection and DB::connection('planetscale')->olap() targets another one.

Stop queue workers sticking to the write database#

With separate read and write hosts and 'sticky' => true, any write pins the connection’s reads to the primary, so you read your own writes. Great for a web request. Not great for a worker: one job that writes keeps every following job on that worker reading from the primary, until the worker restarts.

13.36 adds an opt-in flag that forgets that “I wrote something” state after each job:

use Illuminate\Queue\Worker;

public function boot(): void
{
    Worker::$flushStickyConnections = true; 
}

It is off by default because some apps (knowingly or not) rely on job B reading what job A just wrote on the same worker. If your jobs depend on each other, make that explicit with a chain or a batch, then turn the flag on.

It only matters if your config/database.php connection looks like this:

'mysql' => [
    'driver' => 'mysql',
    'read' => ['host' => [env('DB_READ_HOST')]],
    'write' => ['host' => [env('DB_WRITE_HOST')]],
    'sticky' => true,
    // ...
],

The background queue connection works without your own config#

Laravel 13 apps can dispatch to a background connection, but it only existed in the app skeleton’s config/queue.php. If you deleted that file (Laravel merges the framework defaults) or regenerated it with php artisan config:publish queue, dispatching failed:

InvalidArgumentException  The [background] queue connection has not been configured.

The framework’s own config/queue.php now ships it too, so this works out of the box:

ProcessPodcast::dispatch($podcast)->onConnection('background');

If your app already defines background, yours wins, because queue.connections is merged with your config.

Queued mailables respect DeleteWhenMissingModels and FailOnTimeout#

These attributes worked on jobs, but queued mailables ignored them, because the internal SendQueuedMailable job never copied them over.

use Illuminate\Queue\Attributes\DeleteWhenMissingModels;
use Illuminate\Queue\Attributes\FailOnTimeout;

#[DeleteWhenMissingModels]
#[FailOnTimeout]
class OrderShipped extends Mailable implements ShouldQueue
{
    use Queueable, SerializesModels;

    public function __construct(public Order $order) {}
}

Now, if the order is deleted before a Mail::to($user)->later(...) mail goes out, the job is quietly deleted instead of landing in failed_jobs with a ModelNotFoundException. And with #[FailOnTimeout], a mail that timed out on a slow SMTP server fails instead of being retried, so your customer doesn’t get it twice. The $deleteWhenMissingModels and $failOnTimeout properties work too.

Smaller changes worth knowing#

Backports to 12.x (already in 13.x)#

13.36 also lists a few [12.x] PRs, merged up from the 12.x branch. They are backports of features 13.x already had:

• EncodedParameter (#61871, from #61610 in 13.33): wrap an already-encoded route parameter so route() doesn’t encode its ?, % or # again. New on Laravel 12 in v12.70.0 (same day).
• Named S3 credential providers (#61757, from #61676 in 13.34): 'credentials' => 'ecs' or 'instance' on S3 disks, like SQS. On Laravel 12 since v12.69.3.
• Query fixes (#61838) and a Blade cache file per $echoFormat (#61822), also in v12.70.0.

Upgrade notes#

Run composer update laravel/framework (13.36.0 or later). Every feature above is opt-in: string rules keep working, olap() and the sticky flag do nothing until you call or set them, and an existing background connection in your config is kept.

Two fixes can change behaviour you might be relying on: queued mailables with #[DeleteWhenMissingModels] now disappear instead of failing, and morph map keys in constrain() now actually filter. Both are what the code already said it would do. On Laravel 12, take 12.70.0 for the backports.

Recap#

• Rule::requiredWith(), Rule::confirmed()->customField(), Rule::ip()->version(4) and ~50 more make Form Requests autocomplete, and values with commas are safe.
• DB::olap() runs big Vitess/PlanetScale queries in OLAP mode on both connections, and is a no-op elsewhere.
• Worker::$flushStickyConnections = true stops workers reading from the primary forever after one write.
• The background queue connection now works without your own config/queue.php.
• Queued mailables respect #[DeleteWhenMissingModels] and #[FailOnTimeout].

FAQ#

Next steps#

• Laravel 13.35: QUERY routes, Markdown responses and model defaults(): last week’s release.
• Form Requests with Inertia and Vue: where the new Rule:: builders live.
• Run a queued job and show its progress in Vue: put the queue changes to work.
• Laravel validation docs

Sources#

• Laravel v13.36.0 release notes
• Laravel v12.70.0 release notes
• PR #61833: validation rule builders for remaining rules
• PR #61932: isVitess() and olap()
• PR #61915: flush sticky connections between jobs
• PR #61917: background connection in the default queue config
• PR #61899: DeleteWhenMissingModels and FailOnTimeout on queued mailables
• PR #61898: morph map aliases in constrain(), morphWith() and loadMorph()
• PR #61981: UniqueFor on broadcast events
• PR #61967: case-insensitive Schema::getColumn()
• PR #61755: Markdown mail escaping fix
• Vitess workload modes