The hosting provider warned of a PHP 7.4 deprecation. Senior PHP devs refused to take the role. A security audit flagged 14 CVEs in third-party libs, and the CI2-era custom auth had a session-hijack hole nobody had ever fixed.
Migration CodeIgniter to Laravel migration · CI3 to Laravel 11 · UK
CodeIgniter to Laravel migration for the PHP app that grew up. and needs a framework that grew with it.
We move UK SaaS, marketplaces, and agency-built apps off CodeIgniter 2, 3, or 4 onto Laravel 10/11 — Eloquent, Sanctum, Horizon, and a real test suite. No downtime, no surprise bills.
8CI → Laravel migrations shipped
5-dayfixed-scope migration audit
0downtime cutovers since 2019
(Why founders + CTOs migrate now)
You don’t need to leave CodeIgniter. You need to leave the version that’s costing you growth.
CodeIgniter 3 LTS ended in October 2025. Most CI estates are CI2 or CI3 and out of support. The senior Laravel hiring pool is 5 to 10 times the CI pool, and most CI codebases have no test suite at all. The migration is the moment to fix all three.
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The founder this page is for220 routes · 0 tests · 14 CVEs flagged
Daniel inherited a CI3 marketplace. Four years of code. Then CI3 hit end of life.
Twelve-week migration to Laravel 11. Controllers and models ported. Custom auth replaced by Sanctum plus Fortify. Query Builder code translated to Eloquent with migration files generated. A PHPUnit plus Pest suite added on the way through, reaching 38% coverage. Hosting moved to AWS, PHP 8.3, security holes closed.
The marketplace never went dark. Old CI app kept read-only for 60 days. This page is for the founder or CTO who has decided the migration is happening, and wants it to land without taking the business down.
Eight risks that sink migrations. How we close each one.
We don’t pretend migrations are safe. We make the risks legible and mitigated, in writing, before a single line of production code changes.
- 01
“Our CI custom auth has a session-hijack hole nobody fixed.”
Sanctum + Fortify + Bcrypt, forced reset. Most CI apps roll their own auth or use Ion Auth. We replace it, force a password reset on first login post-cutover, and audit-log the lot.
- 02
“Query Builder and Active Record are everywhere. How does that move?”
Query Builder Eloquent, edge cases tested. CI’s patterns map mostly cleanly to Eloquent. Joins and raw SQL we port and test. Migration files generated for the schema.
- 03
“CI routing is implicit. Will the URLs and method binding survive?”
URI map exported, reproduced in Laravel. We export the URI map and rebuild it in routes/web.php and routes/api.php with middleware and auth guards mapped one-to-one.
- 04
“We have no test suite. A migration without tests sounds terrifying.”
PHPUnit + Pest added as we port. Migration without tests is dangerous. We add them on the way through and target 30 to 50% coverage on critical paths.
- 05
“If sessions break, every user gets logged out at cutover.”
Cookie names preserved during dual-run. CI sessions translated to Laravel sessions. Flash data and form repopulation rebuilt. Users stay logged in through the transition.
- 06
“Four years of CI helpers and custom libraries. What happens to them?”
Audited and ported, behaviour preserved. CI helpers and custom libraries are ported to Laravel macros, service providers, or Blade components. We list every one at audit.
- 07
“We’re on PHP 7.4 shared hosting, EOL since 2022.”
Lift to PHP 8.3 on AWS. We lift the runtime to PHP 8.3 and move to AWS, or your preferred cloud, with a reproducible build and proper observability.
- 08
“A big-bang cutover is the part that keeps me up at night.”
Per-feature flag-based cutover. We don’t big-bang. Feature flags route traffic to Laravel per feature once parity is proven. Old CI app stays read-only for 60 days.
What we almost always find
Four patterns in nearly every CodeIgniter estate.
None of these block a migration. All of them need naming before cutover. Here’s what we do about each one.
Custom auth, session-hijack hole
Most CI apps roll their own auth or use Ion Auth. We replace it with Sanctum plus Fortify plus Bcrypt, force a reset on first login, and audit-log the lot.
Query Builder and Active Record
CI’s patterns map mostly cleanly to Eloquent. Joins and raw SQL we port and test, then generate version-controlled migration files for the schema.
PHP 7.4 on shared hosting
EOL since November 2022. We lift the runtime to PHP 8.3 and move to AWS, or your preferred cloud, with a reproducible build and proper observability.
Four years of CI helpers and libraries
Every helper and custom library is ported to Laravel macros, service providers, or Blade components. We list each one and its destination at audit.
The stack we migrate your CodeIgniter app onto.
We default to Laravel 10 or 11 on PHP 8.3. The migration-specific tooling is what keeps parity honest and the data move reversible.
T1
Default Laravel target stack
LaravelLaravel 10 / 11PHP 8.3Eloquent ORMSanctum + FortifyBlade + Alpine.jsInertia + ReactPest + PHPUnitPlaywrightStripe + CashierHorizon + RedisTelescopeMixpanel
T2
Migration-specific tooling
parity + safetyLaravel ShiftRectorQuery Builder Eloquent generatorDiff testing (Pest)CI3 mysqldumpphpMyAdmin probes
T3
Infra, observability, safety net
AWS-defaultAWSAWS RDSAWS LambdaSQS + RedisS3 + CloudFrontSecrets ManagerForge / VaporTerraformDatadogSentryCloudflare
How a CodeIgniter to Laravel migration runs
Five stages, each one a deliverable.
No mystery box. Each stage is fixed-scope, ends with something you can show your board, and you decide whether to continue at every boundary.
12 wks
CI3 to Laravel 11
220
Routes ported
“Twelve weeks, 220 routes, 14 CVEs closed, and the marketplace never went dark. The first test suite this codebase had ever seen.”
001
5-day migration audit
Two senior engineers read your CodeIgniter codebase, data, and infra. A 20 to 30 page audit pack, risk matrix, and fixed quote. £8K fixed.
002
Plan and parallel build
We build the Laravel target alongside your live CI system. Data dry-runs, integrations rebuilt, dual-write set up. No customer-facing change yet.
003
Eloquent ORM port and tests
Query Builder and Active Record translated to Eloquent with migration files generated. A PHPUnit plus Pest suite added on the way through.
004
Sanctum and Fortify auth
The CI custom auth is replaced, sessions bridged so users stay logged in, then a single forced reset onto Bcrypt-hashed Sanctum auth.
005
Flag-based cutover and decommission
Feature flags route traffic to Laravel per feature once parity is proven. The old CI app stays read-only for 60 days. From £35K fixed scope.
CTOs who’ve left CodeIgniter behind
Real lines from the migrations we’ve shipped, on the things that kept them up at night.
100%
would refer us
Twelve weeks, 220 routes, 14 CVEs closed, and the marketplace never went dark.
Real questions we get on the audit call
Pain-first, soft-second. No marketing varnish.
Yes. CI4 is still maintained. But if you’re hiring, or you have a CI2 or CI3 estate, a CodeIgniter to Laravel migration is the move. We’ll be honest at audit if CI4 is genuinely the right answer for you, rather than selling you a migration you don’t need.
Yes, once. We bridge sessions during cutover so users stay logged in through the transition, then force a reset on next login to put everyone on the new Bcrypt-hashed Sanctum auth. It’s a single inconvenient login, not a mass lockout.
Ten to sixteen weeks is typical. Route count, custom library depth, frontend complexity, and the test coverage gap drive the scope. The 5-day migration audit gives you the real number for your estate before you commit a penny to the sprint.
We audit each one and port it to Laravel macros, service providers, or Blade components. Some map straight to existing Laravel packages like Cashier, Socialite, or Scout. We list every package and its destination in the audit pack, so there are no surprises mid-sprint.
Yes. We run a CodeIgniter to MERN path too, with the same engineering discipline. We’ll recommend Laravel versus MERN at audit based on your team, your hiring market, and your product complexity, not on which one we’d rather build.
30-day walk-away both ways. The migration audit is a fixed £8,000 before the sprint, so you bound the risk at 5 days, not five months. UK VAT registered, listed on Companies House, shipping since 2019. IP assigns on every commit, into your repo from day one.
Every migration has two senior engineers paired, not one. Every decision goes into an ADR the same day, and Mohit reviews every PR. If one leaves, the other has full context the next morning. In seven years, two engineers have left mid-project. Both handovers were inside 48 hours.
Yes, with 14 days’ notice. Engineers move to other projects, spend pauses, and you resume with 14 days’ notice. No cancellation fee, no restart fee. Your legacy CI app stays running the whole time, so a pause never leaves you without a product.
In context
What it looks like shipped.
codeigniter to laravel migration, in context — the dashboards, flows and components your team actually ships, reviews and maintains.
Five lines. That’s it.
Send your current CodeIgniter estate (traffic, data size, integrations), why you want to migrate, and the deadline you’re working to. Mohit replies inside 24 hours with availability and the next 5-day audit slot.
What happens after the email lands
- < 24h
A personal reply.
Availability, and the next available 5-day audit slot.
- Week 1
Migration audit begins.
Risk matrix, target architecture, data plan, fixed quote.
- Cutover
The business stays up.
Flag-based cutover. Old CI app read-only for 60 days.