How to return JSON response on API routes in Laravel

Bright Onapito — Mon, 22 May 2023 08:19:45 +0000

If you work with Laravel, you could have found yourself in a situation where you have written your API Controllers, set up your API routes and setup authentication (for example, using Sanctum) to protect your routes from unauthorized access.
You then try to access a protected route through a browser which will return something like this:

First of all this is a good thing because it means your API route is protected and can only be accessed by authenticated users. However, it doesn't look pretty at all.
By default, Laravel returns header responses in HTML format.
If you access the API route/endpoint using an API testing tool like Postman, Fiddler, RESTer, etc., you could easily update the Header by adding an entry called Accept and setting it to application/json. This would display a 'graceful' json response instead of HTML.

To change this default behaviour programmatically, we would want Laravel to return a json response telling the user that they are unauthenticated. How do we achieve this? It is actually pretty simple to do. Let's see how.

1. Create a Custom Middleware

Using the Artisan CLI, create the middleware like this:



php artisan make:middleware ReturnJsonResponseMiddleware

Open the middleware file located in App\Http\Middleware.
Update the handle method to look like this:



public function handle(Request $request, Closure $next)
    {
        $request->headers->set('Accept', 'application/json');
        return $next($request);
    }

What this does is that it sets the header to accept and return a json response.

2. Publish the Custom Middleware

To do this, we need to add our middleware to the Laravel Kernel under the application's global HTTP middleware stack.
To do this, openKernel.php in App\Http and add the custom middleware class:



protected $middleware = [

       ...
        \App\Http\Middleware\ReturnJsonResponseMiddleware::class, //return graceful unauthenticated message

    ];

That's it! Now when a user tries to access a protect API route through the browser, they will get a json response:



{
message: "Unauthenticated"
}

I hope this was helpful.

Forem: Bright Onapito

How to return JSON response on API routes in Laravel

1. Create a Custom Middleware

2. Publish the Custom Middleware