How to upgrade Laravel to latest minor version?

If you want to upgrade Laravel to latest minor, for example, from 9.5 to 9.6, changing the version of composer.json file won’t help (assuming you run composer install afterwards). You should run composer update instead.

Let’s see the current version before the update:

php artisan --version
Laravel Framework 9.5.1

Now let’s update the framework:

composer update

Loading composer repositories with package information
Info from https://repo.packagist.org: #StandWithUkraine
Updating dependencies

...
  - Upgrading laravel/framework (v9.5.1 => v9.6.0)
...


php artisan --version
Laravel Framework 9.6.0