Laravel is known for being strong and secure, and ‘Middleware’ is a mechanism that helps achieve this. It helps scan and authenticate the URLs before entering your application. It processes and modifies incoming requests before they reach your application's core logic.
Middleware sits between the client and the application's core logic, intercepting and modifying the request and response objects. Features like this give Laravel developers and Laravel development companies an edge in building robust and secure web applications.
Think of ‘Middleware’ as a security guard or a filter for requests. A request to your Laravel application first goes through the middleware before reaching the intended destination, such as a route or controller.
The authenticated request passes through and is sent to the back end. Meanwhile, non-authenticated requests will redirect the user to the login screen.
Not only authentication, but Laravel can do more purposeful things. For example, authentication, authorization, session management, and input validation. There are other tasks ‘Middleware’ can do like CORS middleware is used for adding headers to all the responses. Now let's see types of middleware and how to create it easily, in just a few simple steps.
In general, there are two different types of middleware in Laravel:
Global middleware
Route middleware
As the name suggests, global middleware works for all URLs and every HTTP request of the application. Ideally, a normal middleware property is considered a global one - "$middleware”. In the case of Route middleware, it only works with assigned specific tasks of selected routes.
Creating middleware in Laravel is an easy task, just follow the steps given below.
Open CLI (Command line interface) on your PC and go to your Laravel project directory.
Now run the following given command to create a middleware class.
php artisan make: middleware MyMiddleware
In this given command, replace the “MyMiddleware” with the desired name you want to give to your middleware.
By running this command middleware is created at app/Http/Middleware.
After creating Middleware, you can register your Middleware easily just in a few simple steps. To register the Middleware:
1. Open the app/Http/Kernel.php file in your Laravel project.
2. Inside the kernel class, you'll find the different types of middleware properties that we discussed earlier. The commonly used properties are $middleware and $routeMiddleware.
3. To register $middleware, locate the appropriate property and add the fully qualified class name of the middleware to the $middleware array.
4. To register route middleware, add the middleware class to the $routeMiddleware array, giving it a unique key.
Middleware parameters in Laravel allow you to pass extra data or details to your middleware. For example, giving the role to the authenticated user or applying localization based on the user's preferred language to display the content in their preferred language. With the help of middleware parameters, you can do it easily.
For example: create a middleware that checks if the authenticated user has a specific role to access certain routes. Create a middleware class that checks for the required role(s):
With Middleware parameters, a developer can easily adjust or modify the behaviour of your middleware based on specific values, such as roles, permissions, or other conditions. A feature like this helps remote developers to provide flexible and reusable ways to control access to certain routes or perform other checks in your Laravel application to achieve faster Laravel development services.
Sometimes we have to run some tasks after sending a response to the browser or the user. With terminable middleware, you can perform some actions after the response has been sent to the client. It allows you to execute code or perform cleanup tasks that should happen after the response has been fully processed. with a terminate method, it will automatically run the given task after the response is sent to the browser:
In the terminate method, you can perform various tasks such as logging, updating database records, clearing the cache, or any other actions that need to occur after the response is sent.
Overall, Middleware is a useful feature; this is just the basics of what Laravel can do. Laravel developers utilize these types of features to develop faster Laravel development services. By utilizing the full potential of Laravel, you can create robust and secure development solutions.
