Always return JSON with Laravel API

Originally published by Marco Aurélio Deleu on April 8th 2018 14,895 reads

An extreme simple solution for when you only want to work with API Responses. By extending Laravel Request object, we can override the methods used by the framework that decides whether to give a redirect response or a. response to always prefer. application/json as the Response. No more Redirect Exceptions that try to redirect to /home or /login become another exception: InvalidArgumentException: Route [login] is not defined.. Alexander Lichter have a killer one-line middleware to achieve the same result.

@deleu

Marco Aurélio Deleu

I’ve recently started working on some small projects that will only use the backend portion of Laravel. One of the first things we bump into is the Authentication Exception that tries to redirect to /home or /login. That redirection becomes another exception: InvalidArgumentException: Route [login] is not defined.. Here is an extreme simple solution for when you only want to work with API Responses.

1- Write a new BaseRequest

By extending Laravel Request object, we can override the methods used by the framework that decides whether to give a redirect response or a JSON response to always prefer JSON.

2- Swap the implementation

Inside public/index.php we can find where Laravel builds the Request object. Let’s swap \Illumiate\Http\Request with our new BaseRequest class.

$response = $kernel->handle(
    $request = \App\Http\Requests\BaseRequest::capture()
);

3- Done!

As simple as this, now any HTTP Request will be treated as it wants application/json as the Response. No more Redirect Exceptions.

Update

Alexander Lichter have a killer one-line middleware to achieve the same result. Check out his solution here.

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