Laravel 13.3+ requires PHP 8.4 due to Symfony 8 transitive dependency

[laratables]

Laravel Version

13

PHP Version

8.3

Database Driver & Version

No response

Description

Issue

Laravel 13.3.0+ pulls in symfony/error-handler ^8.0 and
symfony/console ^8.0 which require PHP 8.4, despite Laravel 13
officially advertising PHP 8.3 as the minimum requirement.

Impact

Users running PHP 8.3 with Laravel 13.3+ will encounter the following
error when installing this package:

Workaround

Either:

• Upgrade to PHP 8.4
• Pin Symfony to 7.4 in your project's composer.json:
  composer require symfony/console:"^7.4" symfony/error-handler:"^7.4"
• Stay on Laravel 12 which fully supports PHP 8.3 until August 2026

Notes

This is a Laravel/Symfony issue

Steps To Reproduce

Steps To Reproduce

1. Install PHP 8.3.x on your local machine
2. Create a fresh Laravel 13 project:
   composer create-project laravel/laravel my-app
3. Check the installed Laravel version:
   php artisan --version
   (confirms Laravel 13.3.0 or higher)
4. Attempt to install any additional package:
   composer require laratables/laravel-shipping
5. Observe the following error:

Your requirements could not be resolved to an installable set of packages.
Problem 1
- laravel/framework is locked to version v13.3.0 and an update
of this package was not requested.
- laravel/framework v13.3.0 requires symfony/error-handler
^7.4.0 || ^8.0.0 -> satisfiable by symfony/error-handler[v8.0.8].
- symfony/error-handler v8.0.8 requires php >=8.4 -> your php
version (8.3.30) does not satisfy that requirement.

Environment

• PHP: 8.3.30
• Laravel: 13.3.0
• OS: macOS
• Composer: 2.x

Expected Behaviour

Laravel 13 officially states PHP 8.3 as the minimum requirement.
Installing packages on PHP 8.3 with Laravel 13 should work without
dependency conflicts.

Actual Behaviour

Composer resolves symfony/error-handler to v8.0.8 which requires
PHP 8.4, making it impossible to install additional packages on
PHP 8.3 despite Laravel 13's advertised compatibility.

[kuromadara]

I have submitted a Pull Request to fix this by pinning the Symfony dependencies in the 13.x branch:
PR

I've verified that this restores PHP 8.3 compatibility for Laravel 13 while maintaining support for PHP 8.4 and 8.5.

[rodrigopedra]

Laravel 13.3.0+ pulls in symfony/error-handler ^8.0 and symfony/console ^8.0 which require PHP 8.4, despite Laravel 13 officially advertising PHP 8.3 as the minimum requirement.

It will only pull Symfony 8 components if you run composer update on a system not running PHP 8.3.

If you develop a Laravel 13 app on a system with PHP 8.4 or 8.5 but need to support it running on an environment with PHP 8.3 you can add the following key to your project's composer.json config section:

{
    "config": {
        "platform": {
            "php": "8.3.30"
        }
    }
}

Pinning it to the lowest PHP version your project needs to support.

Composer will use this information when resolving dependencies and won't pull any incompatible dependency.