WriteDaily Now Runs on Laravel: The Migration Ships

The WriteDaily Laravel migration is complete. The production site now runs on the new stack.

For users, the experience is identical — same editor, same stats, same auto-save. The upgrade is entirely under the hood. For the development roadmap, this makes possible years of blocked feature work.

The Cutover

The switch happened last weekend during a low-traffic window. The process:

1. Staging verification. A full production snapshot ran on the Laravel stack for 48 hours with automated health checks.
2. DNS update. Traffic routed to the new stack. Both stacks served requests during propagation (roughly 15 minutes of overlap).
3. Monitoring. 24 hours of elevated logging to catch any anomalies.

Result: zero errors, zero lost sessions, zero user impact. The auto-save pipeline — which has never lost a word in 7 years — continued uninterrupted through the switch.

What Changed

• Eloquent ORM replaces raw SQL queries across all domain objects
• Laravel routing replaces the ad-hoc switch statement from 2013
• Sentry authentication replaces the single-user session system
• Cached sentiment analysis — LIWC runs once on save, results cached in the entry record
• Database migrations — schema changes are now versioned and reversible
• PHPUnit test suite — 87 tests on the core writing and analysis pipelines

What Didn’t Change

The product. Every feature users rely on — the 750-word target, auto-save, pace tracking, sentiment charts, streak calendar, export — works exactly as before. The upgrade was architectural, not experiential.

What This Unlocks

The old codebase made feature additions slow. Every new feature touched files that should have been refactored years ago. The Laravel stack removes that friction.

Immediate priorities:

• Gamification engine — the badge and condition system is the next feature to ship
• Email notifications — streak reminders and weekly summaries
• Mobile-responsive editor — the current UI is desktop-first

The product is live at writedaily.co. The code is stable, the tests pass, and the next seven years of development have a foundation that won’t slow us down.