Upgrading Laravel 5.4 to latest version (5.7)

Question

I am working on Laravel 5.4 with PHP version 5.6.4. My goal is to upgrade my project to Laravel 5.7 with PHP 7.1.

Now my question is: Do I have to upgrade to 5.5 > 5.6 >

Answer 1

From my point of view, it would help to upgrade step by step. This helps to to see whether your application is already compatible with all changes that need to be made.

If you upgrade to 5.7 directly and face larger problems due to the changes, your quickest option is to downgrade to 5.4 again.

If you upgrade to 5.5 in the first step, you can make your application compatible to 5.5, test it thoroughly, deploy it, and start to test what needs to be done for the upgrade to 5.6.