Login and Sessions

Goal

This snapshot advances Marlowe Gazette by teaching you to wire Laravel's web auth guard without Breeze or Jetstream.

Every numbered folder is complete and independently runnable, so you can inspect this stage without rebuilding earlier lessons.

Prerequisites

Use PHP 8.2 or newer, Composer, Docker, and a terminal. Basic PHP, HTML, and SQL familiarity will help.

The Laravel development server uses port 8000. Root Docker Compose exposes MySQL 8 on port 3307 and each snapshot has a separate database.

• PHP and Composer
• Docker
• A code editor and terminal

Concepts

The session guard authenticates credentials, stores the user identifier in server-side session state, and restores the user on later requests.

Laravel keeps HTTP routes, controllers, Eloquent models, validation, authorization, and Blade presentation in explicit layers.

Walkthrough

Inspect custom login/logout routes and controllers, guest/auth middleware, session regeneration, invalidation, and remember-me behavior.

Inspect the matching snapshot around the example. The repository includes validation, errors, CSRF protection, and the surrounding application structure.

if (Auth::guard('web')->attempt($credentials, $remember)) {
    $request->session()->regenerate();
}

Run and verify

Start MySQL from the repository root, enter 07-Login-And-Sessions, install dependencies, copy the environment file, generate an application key, migrate, seed, and serve.

Open http://localhost:8000. From data lessons onward, Ada and Grace are deterministic accounts with password password123.

docker compose up -d
git clone https://github.com/michaeldunga1/fcc-laravel-blog.git
cd fcc-laravel-blog/07-Login-And-Sessions
composer install
cp .env.example .env
php artisan key:generate
php artisan migrate --seed
php artisan storage:link
php artisan serve --host=0.0.0.0 --port=8000

Troubleshooting

A stale session or changed APP_KEY invalidates cookies; clear cookies and confirm SESSION_DRIVER tables are migrated.

If MySQL fails, verify Docker is healthy, port 3307 is free, and this snapshot's DB_DATABASE matches its unique marlowe_XX database.

• Read the first exception
• Clear cached config after environment changes
• Never commit .env, vendor, or node_modules

Try this

Sign in as Ada, restart the server, verify persistence, then log out.

Exercise both a successful request and a validation or authorization failure before moving to the next snapshot.

• Make one focused change
• Test it in the browser
• Compare the next snapshot after it works