Laravel 5 Middleware for Database Transactions

gistfile1.php

<?php namespace App\Http\Middleware;

use Closure;
use Illuminate\Http\Response;

class DBTransaction
{
    /**
     * Handle an incoming request.
     *
     * @param  \Illuminate\Http\Request $request
     * @param  \Closure                 $next
     *
     * @return mixed
     * @throws \Exception
     */
    public function handle($request, Closure $next)
    {
        \DB::beginTransaction();

        try {
            $response = $next($request);
        } catch (\Exception $e) {
            \DB::rollBack();
            throw $e;
        }

        if ($response instanceof Response && $response->getStatusCode() > 399) {
            \DB::rollBack();
        } else {
            \DB::commit();
        }

        return $response;
    }
}

Here the question is: must a response status code revert the transaction?

Well I believe so, as any status code from 400 on are considered either an user error (400-499) or a server error (500-599).

I would not expect an unauthorized request to perform a database operation. And nothing is preventing, on either middleware, an exception to be reported.

If you want your exceptions to be saved to a database, you should use a different database connection for the logger, this would allow logging anything regardless of any open transactions, and is actually a better approach as from an application perspective that a connection responsible for transactional data (application logic) to be different than your infrastructure connection(s) (logging, session, cache, etc...)

Imagine rolling back a session data change because it happened inside a transaction you manually opened and rolled back, regardless of using a middleware for automatic transaction handling.

When using different logging, session, cache and other drivers, rolling back or committing a transaction already does not affect any approaches.

If you believe this middleware should not consider just the status code as a criteria, you can change its code above. Or use the package you linked.

Both of them just offers different takes based on different opinions.