How do I capture a protected page's url in query string? - php

Question

Beware with me for a second as I try to lay the background to my issue.
So I having using the python web framework Flask close to a year now and it has a wonderful extension called Flask-Login that helps provide user session management kind of like this in laravel.
Having said all that, there is a certain feature in Flask-Login that provides the functionality that when a user is not logged or signed in and tries to access that a page that requires one to be authenticated for example /create_post, they will be redirected back to the login page with that page encoded in the query string like /login?next=%2Fcreate_post.
Am trying to implement the same feature in a laravel project that am working on so I can redirect the user to the page they probably wanted to go to in the first place or to a different route in case that query string doesn't exist and I cannot seem to find where to put my code to do just that and I don't want to mess with anything in the vendor directory(because of the obvious issues that come with that), and I have tried manipulating the file app/Http/Middleware/RedirectIfAuthenticated.php by doing what is below but with no success.
public function handle($request, Closure $next, $guard = null)
{
if (Auth::guard($guard)->check()) {
return redirect('/');
}
$previous_url = url()->previous(); // how do I insert this in query string
return $next($request);
}
Will I have to create my own middleware or is there another way of implementing this kind of feature in laravel?
NOTE: I am not using the default laravel authentication system. I have created my own controller SessionsController to handle logins which contains the below code.
<?php
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use App\User;
class SessionsController extends Controller
{
public function __construct()
{
$this->middleware('auth')->except(['create', 'login']);
}
public function create()
{
$data = [
'title' => 'Login',
'body_class' => 'hold-transition login-page',
];
return view('auth.login', $data);
}
public function login(Request $request)
{
$this->validate($request, [
'username' => 'required',
'password' => 'required',
]);
$user = User::checkCredentials($request->username, $request->password);
if (!$user) {
return back()->with([
'class' => 'alert-danger',
'message' => 'Please check your credentials',
]);
}
// set session active flag to true
$user->session_active = true;
$user->save();
auth()->login($user);
return redirect()->route('dashboard');
}
public function destroy()
{
$user = auth()->user();
$user->last_login = date('Y-m-d H:i:s');
$user->session_active = false;
$user->save();
auth()->logout();
return redirect()->route('login')->with([
'class' => 'alert-success',
'message' => 'You logged out successfully',
]);
}
}
Thank you.

Answer 1

I managed to somewhat solve my issue even though I didn't use query strings as I had wanted.
I create a helper function get_previous_url as shown below
/**
* Gets the previous url
*
* #return null|string
*/
function get_previous_url()
{
$host = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
$previous_url = url()->previous();
// check if previous url is from the same host
if (!str_contains($previous_url, $host)) {
return null;
}
// get the previous url route
list(, $route) = explode($host, $previous_url);
// make sure the route is not the index, login or logout route
if (in_array(substr($route, 1), ['', 'login', 'logout'])) {
$route = '';
}
return $route;
}
And then I called the same function in my SessionsController class in the create method by doing this
public function create()
{
$previous_url = get_previous_url();
if ($previous_url) {
session(['previous_url' => $previous_url]);
}
...
}
And then I changed my login method to
public function login(Request $request)
{
...
$redirect = redirect()->route('dashboard'); // '/'
if (session()->has('previous_url')) {
$redirect = redirect(session()->pull('previous_url'));
}
return $redirect;
}