Prevent Sessions For Routes in Laravel (Custom on-demand session handling)

Question

I am building APIs for my Android app using laravel and default session driver set to REDIS.

I found a good article here http://dor.ky/laravel-prevent-sessions-for-routes-via-a-filter/ which sort of serves the purpose.

However when ever I hit the url it also hits the redis and generates the key which is empty. Now I want avoid creating empty session keys in redis. Ideally it should not hit the redis How can I do that?

Can we customise sessios in a way so that sessions are generated only for specific routes (or disable for specific routes)?

I can explain more with specific use case, please let me know.

Answer 1

Its really easy using the middleware in Laravel 5, I needed any request with an API key not to have a session and I simply did :

<?php

namespace App\Http\Middleware;

use Closure;
use Illuminate\Session\Middleware\StartSession as BaseStartSession;

class StartSession extends BaseStartSession
{

    /**
     * Handle an incoming request.
     *
     * @param  \Illuminate\Http\Request  $request
     * @param  \Closure  $next
     * @return mixed
     */
    public function handle($request, Closure $next)
    {
        if(\Request::has('api_key'))
        {
            \Config::set('session.driver', 'array');
        }
        return parent::handle($request, $next);
    }
}

Also you will need to extend the SessionServiceProvider as follows:

<?php namespace App\Providers;

use Illuminate\Session\SessionServiceProvider as BaseSessionServiceProvider;

class SessionServiceProvider extends BaseSessionServiceProvider
{
    /**
     * Register the service provider.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function register()
    {
        $this->registerSessionManager();

        $this->registerSessionDriver();

        $this->app->singleton('App\Http\Middleware\StartSession');
    }
}

and place in your config/app.php under providers:

'App\Providers\SessionServiceProvider',

Also you must change it in your kernel file: App/Http/Kernel.php, in the $middlewareGroups section change the default entry, \Illuminate\Session\Middleware\StartSession::class, to your new class \App\Http\Middleware\StartSession::class,.