How to validate user input with Laravel’s built in rules

Laravel 4 offers some great helper classes and methods for validating user input. We’ll take quick look at some of them in this article.

Assumptions:

• You have some routing setup to accept POST requests
• You have a controller to handle the POST request

Here’s the skeleton for our controller (our routing points to @registerUser):

class UsersController extends BaseController {
  public function registerUser() {}
}

I also have an array of rules inside my corresponding model (User.php – the one you get for free from Laravel). This could be an array from anywhere, you just need to reference it later on:

/**
 * Registration form validation rules
 */
 public static $registrationRules = array(
   'email' => 'required|email|unique:users',
   'password' => 'required|between:6,18|confirmed',
   'password_confirmation' => 'required'
 );

The confirmation validation works by suffixing the original field with _confirmation. As you can see – password becomes password_confirmation. Laravel then understands the association. There are many more rules you can include, but I only needed a few for this example.

Then back inside our UsersController.php, we can add our validation rules to the user input:

class UsersController extends BaseController {
  public function registerUser() {
    $validator = Validator::make( Input::all(), User::$registrationRules ); // 1

    if( $validator->passes() ) { // 2
      $user = new User;
      $user->email = Input::get( 'email' );
      $user->password = Hash::make( Input::get( 'password' ) );
      $user->save();
    }
    else {
      return Response::json( array(
        'error' => true,
        'msg' => $validator->messages() // 3
      ), 400 );
    }
  }
}

1. We create a new instance of Validator and pass in all the user input and run it by our validation rules (which is an array inside of our User.php model.
2. If it validates, we process the user details and add it into the database
3. If the user input doesn’t validate, we pass the automatically generated error messages back as JSON as a 400 response to the client

These great validation helper methods really speed up your development time.