Laravel 5 - Error accessing many-to-many data - php

Question

In a Laravel 5 app, I have a "User" model and a "Permission" model, both with corresponding tables, that have a many-to-many relationship. There is a pivot table as well: "permission_user".
The User model contains the following method:
public function permissions()
{
return $this->belongsToMany('App\Permission');
}
And the Permission model contains the following method:
public function users()
{
return $this->belongsToMany('App\User');
}
I have been accessing user permissions in custom middleware with the following code, and it's been working splendidly until today.
$permissions = \Auth::user()->permissions()->get();
All of a sudden, this is breaking. I get the following error:
ErrorException in BelongsToMany.php line 177: Argument 1 passed to
Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\BelongsToMany::hydratePivotRelation()
must be of the type array, object given, called in
/Server/sites/app/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Relations/BelongsToMany.php
on line 158 and defined
Really not sure what's going on here. In an attempt to follow the docs more closely, I also tried this:
foreach (\Auth::user()->permissions as $permission)
{
// do something with $permission
}
But I get the same thing (the stack trace shows that the lines shown here are the last ones executed before heading into the Laravel source). I did update Laravel with Composer around the time this happened, but thought it unlikely that something in Laravel source has caused the problem. Can anyone see what I might be doing wrong here, and how I can fix it?

Answer 1

Sit tight, I believe this might actually just a current bug with Laravel 5 (which is still technically in alpha, so breaking changes are to be expected).
Taylor Otwell (the creator of Laravel) tweeted this earlier:
https://twitter.com/taylorotwell/status/553262692426059776
However, it looks like several parts of Laravel 5 core still need to be updated to be compatible with this change.
If you need your app to work right now, just change this in your composer.json file:
"laravel/framework": "~5.0",
to this:
"laravel/framework": "dev-master#9b108d85ce19300dfdd479fa4e05d9ea6e4e3abc",
And then run a composer update. This will pull in yesterdays version of Laravel 5, which was working.
Don't forget to change it back though once this is fixed!