The auth scaffold in Laravel 5.2

If you're like me, many of the applications you build in Laravel have a similar Saas-type framework: user signup, user login, password reset, public sales page, logged-in dashboard, logout route, and a base Bootstrap style for when you're just getting started.

Laravel used to have a scaffold for this out of the box. It disappeared recently, to my great chagrin, but it's now back as an Artisan command: make:auth.

What does it provide? Let's dig in.

What changed?

We have a layout (resources/views/layouts/app.blade.php) that is the core of this scaffold, and then a series of views that extend it:

• welcome.blade.php - the public welcome page
• home.blade.php - the dashboard for logged-in users
• auth/login.blade.php - the login page
• auth/register.blade.php - the register/signup page
• auth/passwords/email.blade.php - the password reset confirmation page
• auth/passwords/reset.blade.php - the password reset prompt page
• auth/emails/password.blade.php - the password reset email

Our public page is still routed via routes.php:

Route::get('/', function () {
    return view('welcome');
});

And we now have a HomeController, which routes our dashboard:

class HomeController extends Controller
{
    /**
     * Show the application dashboard.
     *
     * @return Response
     */
    public function index()
    {
        return view('home');
    }
}

This is of course routed in routes.php in the web group. And notice that there's something else new there: The Route::auth() method:

Route::group(['middleware' => 'web'], function () {
    Route::auth();

    Route::get('/home', 'HomeController@index');
});

Route::auth()

The auth() method is a shortcut to defining the following routes:

// Authentication Routes...
$this->get('login', 'Auth\AuthController@showLoginForm');
$this->post('login', 'Auth\AuthController@login');
$this->get('logout', 'Auth\AuthController@logout');

// Registration Routes...
$this->get('register', 'Auth\AuthController@showRegistrationForm');
$this->post('register', 'Auth\AuthController@register');

// Password Reset Routes...
$this->get('password/reset/{token?}', 'Auth\PasswordController@showResetForm');
$this->post('password/email', 'Auth\PasswordController@sendResetLinkEmail');
$this->post('password/reset', 'Auth\PasswordController@reset');

The frontend

Now let's take a look at what we get in the browser:

As you can see we have Bootstrap CSS, a basic Bootstrap app layout, and helpful to our basic auth actions.

App.blade.php

So what does this master layout look like?

We get FontAwesome, the Lato font, Bootstrap CSS, a basic hamburger-on-mobile responsive layout, jQuery, Bootstrap JS, and placeholders that are commented out for the default output CSS and JS files if you choose to use Elixir.

We also have a top nav that links us home, and links guests to either login or register, and links authenticated users to log out.

Conclusion

That's it! It's not anything complex, but it's 30-60 minutes of typing that you just saved on every app that needs it.