use DELETE method in route with Laravel 5.4

Question

I'm working on a Laravel (v 5.4) project and i did the CRUD to manage categories. Currently, i can create a new category and i would be able to delete.

I created the view (with blade) to delete the categories :

<table class="table">
  <thead>
    <th>Name</th>
    <th>Action</th>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    @foreach ($categories as $category)
      <tr>
        <td>$category->name</td>
        <td>
          <a href="{{ url('/categories', ['id' => $category->id]) }}">
            <button class="btn btn-default">
            Delete
            </button>
          </a>
        </td>
      </tr>
    @endforeach
  </tbody>
</table>

And in the routing file web.php, i wrote :

Route::delete('/categories/{id}', CategoryController@destroy);

I have a controller CategoryController with a method destroy() who delete category and redirect to list of categories. But when i click on the button to delete, i get an error that explain this route is not define. If i replace Route::delete with Route::get it works. I think the url is called with GET but i would keep that for an other action.

I tried to replace the link with a form and "DELETE" as the value of "method" attribute but it didn't work.

How can i call url with DELETE method to catch it with Route::delete ?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If you click on an url it will always be a GET method.

Since you wish to define it as DELETE, you should remake it into a post form and add

<input type="hidden" name="_method" value="delete" />

in it. Like replace:

<a href="{{ url('/categories', ['id' => $category->id]) }}">
    <button class="btn btn-default">Delete</button>
</a>

with:

<form action="{{ url('/categories', ['id' => $category->id]) }}" method="post">
    <input class="btn btn-default" type="submit" value="Delete" />
    <input type="hidden" name="_method" value="delete" />
    <input type="hidden" name="_token" value="{{ csrf_token() }}">
</form>

Same goes for PUT request.

Since Laravel 5.1 method_field:

<form action="{{ url('/categories', ['id' => $category->id]) }}" method="post">
    <input class="btn btn-default" type="submit" value="Delete" />
    {!! method_field('delete') !!}
    {!! csrf_field() !!}
</form>

Since Laravel 5.6 just with @ tag:

<form action="{{ url('/categories', ['id' => $category->id]) }}" method="post">
    <input class="btn btn-default" type="submit" value="Delete" />
    @method('delete')
    @csrf
</form>