How to log all HTTP requests and responses in Laravel 5. Using middleware to capture, store, and analyse traffic for debugging and auditing.

It's important when deploying a new platform to monitor the first few interactions and keep an eye out for unintended issues.

Logging requests and responses against the server is a great way to get a birds eye view of the action.

With Laravel 5, this is best done with middleware.

Create a clean git branch to do this work on 🙂
Create the LogAfterRequest.php middleware file, in App\Http\Middleware\LogAfterRequest.php, and paste the following contents:

fullUrl();
      $ip=$request->ip();
      $r=new \App\Models\Request();
      $r->ip=$ip;
      $r->url=$url;
      $r->request=json_encode($request->all());
      $r->response=$response;
      $r->save();
    }
}

Wire up the middleware in App\Http\Kernel.php

protected $middleware = [
\Illuminate\Foundation\Http\Middleware\CheckForMaintenanceMode::class,
\Illuminate\Foundation\Http\Middleware\ValidatePostSize::class,
***\App\Http\Middleware\LogAfterRequest::class,***
\Illuminate\Foundation\Http\Middleware\ConvertEmptyStringsToNull::class,
];

Create a migration to hold the requests/responses in your database, and create a model to pass to the database.

php artisan make:migration log_requests_responses
php artisan make:model Models/Request

Add the following structure to the new migrations file in app/database/migrations:

public function up()
{
Schema::create("requests",function(Blueprint $table){
 $table->increments("id");
 $table->text("request");
 $table->text("response");
 $table->string("url", 1024);
 $table->string("ip", 16);
 $table->timestamps();
});
}

Run php artisan migrate and check that the requests are recording.
Be super careful about this code finding its way to production and for how long.

There's a real cost to your page load if storing all of this in your database, and huge security implications to storing whole requests/responses (such as live tokens, passwords).

Also, you should be aware of XSS implications of storing/retrieving unsanitized inputs (as we are above).

You should make further adjustments to the logging code to scrub tokens and passwords at the very least.

Code Workshop

Laravel 5: Logging all requests and responses