Laravel - Correct way to catch cURL exceception - php

Question

I am building a simple REST API package using cURL and would like to catch an error and then return a view. I am able to throw an error if I dd($e) but if I try and return a view it just continues with the code after the catch function. Shouldn't PHP kill the process and just go to the login view?
try{
$response = Http::timeout(2)->asForm()->post('https://' . $this->ip_address, [
'username' => $this->username,
'password' => $this->password
]);
} catch(\Illuminate\Http\Client\ConnectionException $e) {
return view('auth.login');
}
If I get a cURL timeout exception I just want to go back to the login page for now. If I put in a bogus IP address obviously it will timeout after 2 seconds, which is what I am testing.
Using Laravel Http client, how can I catch that error and display the auth login view?

Answer 1

Unlike Guzzle, Laravel's HttpClient does not throw errors if the response is > 400.
You should simply use an if statement to check the response status code. See: https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/http-client#error-handling
You can call use the following checks:
// Determine if the status code is >= 200 and < 300...
$response->successful();
// Determine if the status code is >= 400...
$response->failed();
// Determine if the response has a 400 level status code...
$response->clientError();
// Determine if the response has a 500 level status code...
$response->serverError();
So in your case you can simply do something like this:
$response = Http::timeout(2)->asForm()->post('https://' . $this->ip_address, [
'username' => $this->username,
'password' => $this->password
]);
if ($response->failed()) {
return view('your-view')->with([
'message' => 'Failed.',
]);
}

Answer 2

Could you try this please?
try {
$response = Http::timeout(2)->asForm()->post('https://' . $this->ip_address, [
'username' => $this->username,
'password' => $this->password
]);
} catch(\Illuminate\Http\Client\ConnectionException $e) {
return view('auth.login')->with('errorMessage', $e->getMessage());
}
And you can show the error on the frontend, like below;
#if(!empty($errorMessage))
<div class="alert alert-danger"> {{ $errorMessage }}</div>
#endif

Answer 3

It is better if you change your approach in using Laravel's HTTP client,
Move time-intensive tasks - like Http requests - to a job, and run that job in a background queue.
Then, for example, if you wanna use that Http request for authentication, handle your auth logic on that job, don't forget to log and handle exceptions.
afterward, protect your private routes using middlewares and make redirect unauthenticated users to your login page in that middleware.
I hope I could be clear