Laravel Quick Tip: Handling CsrfToken Expiration gracefully

gistfile1.txt

Quick tip for handling CSRF Token Expiration - common issue is when you use csrf protection is that if 
a form sits there for a while (like a login form, but any the same) the csrf token in the form will 
expire & throw a strange error.

Handling it is simple, and is a good lesson for dealing with other types of errors in a custom manner.

In Middleware you will see a file VerifyCsrfToken.php and be tempted to handle things there. DON'T! 
Instead, look at your app/Exceptions/Handler.php, at the render($request, Exception $e) function.

All of your exceptions go through here, unless you have excluded them in the $dontReport array at the 
top of this file. You can see we have the $request and also the Exception that was thrown.

Take a quick look at the parent of VerifyCsrfToken - Illuminate\Foundation\Http\Middleware\VerifyCsrfToken. 
You can see from VerifyCsrfToken.php that handle() is the function called to do the token check. In the 
parent class, if the token fails, a `TokenMismatchException` is thrown.

So back in the Handler class, let's specifically handle that type of exception:

    public function render($request, Exception $e)
    {

        if ($e instanceof \Illuminate\Session\TokenMismatchException)
        {
            return redirect()
                    ->back()
                    ->withInput($request->except('password'))
                    ->with([
                        'message' => 'Validation Token was expired. Please try again',
                        'message-type' => 'danger']);
        }   

        return parent::render($request, $e);
    }
    
The code is simple - if the exception is a `TokenMismatchException` we will handle it just like 
a validation error in a controller. In our forms(s), we need to be sure to use the 
$request->old('field_name') (or the old('field_name') helper function) to repopulate. Simply going 
"back" will refresh the form with a new token so they can re-submit.

CAREFUL! - I found that using the http://laravelcollective.com/ Form::open() tag seemed to be 
incompatible with the token - redirect()->back() was not refresh the token for me. This may just be 
something in my code, but when I used a regular html tag it was fine. If this is happening to you, 
try that.

I have a REST/single page application and found this. For the ajax questions, this worked for me... Not super graceful, but it does the trick.
`
public function render($request, Exception $e)
{

    if ($e instanceof \Illuminate\Session\TokenMismatchException) {
        if ($request->ajax()) {
            return response([
                'error' => 'expired',
                'success' => false,
            ], 302);
        } else {
            return redirect('/');
        }
    }

    return parent::render($request, $e);
}

`
Of course, your code that handles 302 in an ajax request needs to listen for this and manually redirect... location.href = "/" or something similar, but it works.

does it works in Laravel 8?

This is great, thank you.

Regarding how to handle AJAX requests, here's what I did.

• First, add the code above to Handler.php, so normal requests are handled gracefully.

• Next, tweak that code a bit to ignore AJAX requests. If it is an AJAX request, we don't want to redirect back with an error, so exclude them like so:

  if ($e instanceof \Illuminate\Session\TokenMismatchException && ! $request->expectsJson()) {
  

• Now AJAX requests will throw an exception just as before, and we need to handle those in JS. I'm using jQuery, so for eg with $.post():

  $.post(...)
  .fail(function xhr, status, error) {
      if (xhr.status === 419) {
          // Token error - handle however you want
          alert('The page has expired due to inactivity. Please refresh and try again');
      }
  });
  

does it works in Laravel 8?

@dagpacket you can try this code, it woks on 8

    use Exception;

    . . . 

    public function register() {

        $this->reportable(function (Throwable $e) {
            // ..
        });

        $this->renderable(function (Exception $e, $request) {
            if ($e->getPrevious() instanceof \Illuminate\Session\TokenMismatchException) {
                return redirect()
                ->back()
                ->withInput($request->except('password', 'password_confirmation', '_token'))
                ->withErrors(['Your form has expired, please try again']);
            }
        });
    }