Laravel 5.2 session not persisting - php

Question

Lately I've been working on a project in Laravel 5.2 and now I'm having problems with sessions not persisting. I've read most of the questions already asked regarding this but everyone has the same answer that I have already tried - applying web middleware.
I've read that there was a new L5.2 update where the web middleware group is already applied by default. I checked my routes with php artisan route:list and I can see that every route has only 1 web middleware applied.
I'm creating session with $request->session()->put('key', 'value') but as soon as I comment that line the session is nowhere to be seen anymore.
Edit
I want to set the session inside a controller when I visit a news page, but I tried it on a simple test route as well. Route where I set this is news/{id} and I want to use it on the front page which is in /
I wish to store recently visited pages in session so I can then show it to the user on the front page.
Session config file I left untouched. So it's using file driver

Answer 1

Here is a tested routes to use for your projects
Please use a middleware instead of the function in the routes file
routes.php
// Only as a demo
// Use a middleware instead
function addToSession ($routeName) {
$visited = session()->get('visited', []);
array_push($visited, $routeName);
session()->put('visited', $visited);
}
Route::get('/', function () {
addToSession('/');
return view('welcome');
});
Route::get('/second', function () {
addToSession('/second');
return view('welcome');
});
Route::get('/third', function () {
addToSession('/third');
return view('welcome');
});
Route::get('/history', function() {
return session()->get('visited');
});
The /history route will return a JSON having the history.