August 17, 2015

Adding Authentication to Laravel 5.1

Laravel 5 came out with a nice Auth scaffolding, which included all of the routes/controllers/views for registering and authenticating a user. Laravel 5 got away with this to keep the product slim (which I think is a good move).

Laravel does have documentation on building authentication into your Laravel 5.1 app. However, I’ll go through this in a bit more detail below…

Install Laravel #

First, make sure you have a fresh install of Laravel. Here is my tutorial on Installing Laravel 5.1 on OSX with MAMP.

Twitter Bootstrap #

After downloading bootstrap add the bootstrap.css file into the public/css directory. (you may have to create the css directory.

Also copy over bootstrap’s fonts directory into your app’s public directory.

Authentication Routes #

Add the following routes to the app/Http/routes.php file.

// Authentication routes...
Route::get('auth/login', 'Auth\AuthController@getLogin');
Route::post('auth/login', 'Auth\AuthController@postLogin');
Route::get('auth/logout', 'Auth\AuthController@getLogout');

// Registration routes...
Route::get('auth/register', 'Auth\AuthController@getRegister');
Route::post('auth/register', 'Auth\AuthController@postRegister');

// Password reset link request routes...
Route::get('password/email', 'Auth\PasswordController@getEmail');
Route::post('password/email', 'Auth\PasswordController@postEmail');

// Password reset routes...
Route::get('password/reset/{token}', 'Auth\PasswordController@getReset');
Route::post('password/reset', 'Auth\PasswordController@postReset');

Authentication Views #

First let’s create a blade template to use for all of our other views. We can do that by creating a resources/views/auth/app.blade.php file. And copy/paste the code shown here: https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/5.0/resources/views/app.blade.php

Create a new resources/views/auth directory. Within that directory, create the following files.

login.blade.php (https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/5.0/resources/views/auth/login.blade.php)
password.blade.php (https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/5.0/resources/views/auth/password.blade.php)
register.blade.php (https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/5.0/resources/views/auth/register.blade.php)
reset.blade.php (https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/5.0/resources/views/auth/reset.blade.php)

For the “forgot password” email, create a resources/views/emails directory, and place the following file into it.

password.blade.php (https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/5.0/resources/views/emails/password.blade.php)

Create Database & Tables #

To make it so that we can actually register a new user and login, we’ll have to create the proper database tables. Fortunately, this is already available through migrations.

First, create a new database table, and define it’s connection in the .env file.

 DB_HOST=localhost
 DB_DATABASE=name
 DB_USERNAME=root
 DB_PASSWORD=xxxxxxx

The trigger the migration with the following command:

php artisan migrate

Since I’m using MAMP, I got this error when trying to migrate.

[PDOException]

SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] No such file or directory

Solution was to add the unix_socket key with a value of the path that the mysql.sock resides in MAMP.

'mysql' => [
        'driver'    => 'mysql',
        'host'      => env('DB_HOST', 'localhost'),
        'database'  => env('DB_DATABASE', 'forge'),
        'username'  => env('DB_USERNAME', 'forge'),
        'password'  => env('DB_PASSWORD', ''),
        'charset'   => 'utf8',
        'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
        'prefix'    => '',
        'strict'    => false,
        'unix_socket'   => '/Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock',
    ],

Setup SMTP Server #

Laravel 5.1 defaults to mailtrap.io. First time I gave this a try, and it’s actually quite easy! First step is to setup mailtrap.io account.

Update .env file with SMTP settings (provided after signing up)

MAIL_DRIVER=smtp
MAIL_HOST=mailtrap.io
MAIL_PORT=2525
MAIL_USERNAME=xxxxxx
MAIL_PASSWORD=xxxxxxx
MAIL_ENCRYPTION=null

Update from address in config/mail.php file.

'from' => ['address' => 'noreply@test.com', 'name' => 'test'],

Create Dashboard #

Add dashboard routes

Route::get('dashboard', 'Dash\DashboardController@home');

Add dashboard controllers to app/Http/Controllers/Dash/DashboardController.php

 <?php

namespace App\Http\Dash\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;
    use App\Http\Controllers\Controller;

class DashboardController extends Controller
{
    public function home(Request $request)
    {
        return view('dashboard/home');
    }
}

Note the use of use App\Http\Controllers\Controller;. This is important since were using a different namespace for our dashboard.

And the view at resources/views/dashboard/home.blade.php:

   @extends('app')

@section('content')
<div class="container">
    <div class="row">
        <div class="col-md-10 col-md-offset-1">
            <div class="panel panel-default">
                <div class="panel-heading">Dashboard</div>

                <div class="panel-body">
                    You are logged in!
                </div>
            </div>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>
@endsection

Update login redirects:

Update app/Http/Middleware/RedirectIfAuthenticated

with:

return redirect('/dashboard');

Add to Auth/PasswordController.php and Auth/AuthController.php files.

protected $redirectTo = '/dashboard';

Authenticate Dashboard #

To restrict access to the dashboard to only those that are logged in, we can ddd the following to the Dashboard controller

public function __construct() 
{
    $this->middleware('auth');
}

Kudos