Caffeine for Laravel

Supporting This Package

This is an MIT-licensed open source project with its ongoing development made possible by the support of the community. If you'd like to support this, and our other packages, please consider becoming a sponsor.

Goal

Prevent forms from timing out when submitting them after leaving them on-screen for a considerable amount of time. (Laravel defaults to 120 minutes, but that is configurable and could be different site-by-site.)

Implementation

To achieve this, we are sending a caffeine-drip (a request at regular intervals) to keep the session from timing out. This is only implemented on pages with a _token field, so all other pages will time-out as normal.

Reasoning

I chose this approach to keep the integrity of site-security, by avoiding the following:

exposing the CSRF Token on an unsecured endpoint.
eliminating CSRF Token validation on specific routes, or even altogether.
removing session-timeout on all pages.

Considerations

Incompatible Packages

Voyager has been reported as being incompatible. To work around this, configure Caffeine to use route-based middleware on all non-Voyager routes. See details below for configuration and implementation of route-based middleware.

Routes

This package adds the routes under genealabs/laravel-caffeine.

Dependencies

Your project must fullfill the following:

Laravel 8.0 or higher
PHP 7.3 or higher.

Installation

composer require genealabs/laravel-caffeine

Upgrade Notes

If you have previously registered the middleware, please remove the following middleware from app/Http/Kernel.php:

// protected $middleware = [
    GeneaLabs\LaravelCaffeine\Http\Middleware\LaravelCaffeineDripMiddleware::class,
// ];

0.6.0

This update changes the config file setting names. Please delete the published config file config/genealabs-laravel-caffeine.php if it exists, and follow the configuration instructions below.

Configuration

return [
    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Drip Interval
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | Here you may configure the interval with which Caffeine for Laravel
    | keeps the session alive. By default this is 5 minutes (expressed
    | in milliseconds). This needs to be shorter than your session
    | lifetime value configured set in "config/session.php".
    |
    | Default: 300000 (int)
    |
    */
    'drip-interval' => 300000,

    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Domain
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | You may optionally configure a separate domain that you are running
    | Caffeine for Laravel on. This may be of interest if you have a
    | monitoring service that queries other apps. Setting this to
    | null will use the domain of the current application.
    |
    | Default: null (null|string)
    |
    */
    'domain' => null,

    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Drip Endpoint URL
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | Sometimes you may wish to white-label your app and not expose the AJAX
    | request URLs as belonging to this package. To achieve that you can
    | rename the URL used for dripping caffeine into your application.
    |
    | Default: 'genealabs/laravel-caffeine/drip' (string)
    |
    */
    'route' => 'genealabs/laravel-caffeine/drip', // Customizable end-point URL

    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Checking for Lapsed Drips
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | If the browser is put to sleep on (for example on mobile devices or
    | laptops), it will still cause an error when trying to submit the
    | form. To avoid this, we force-reload the form 2 minutes prior
    | to session time-out or later. Setting this setting to 0
    | will disable this check if you don't want to use it.
    |
    | Default: 2000 (int)
    |
    */
    'outdated-drip-check-interval' => 2000,

    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Use Route Middleware
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | Drips are enabled via route middleware instead of global middleware.
    |
    | Default: false (bool)
    |
    */
    'use-route-middleware' => false,

];

Only publish the config file if you need to customize it:

php artisan caffeine:publish --config

Usage

That was it! It will apply itself automatically where it finds a form with a _token field, or a meta tag named "csrf-token", while pages are open in browsers.

Prevent Caffeination

There are two methods to prevent Caffeine for Laravel from dripping to keep the session alive: disabling it in Blade using the meta tag method, or enabling route-middleware mode, and then only enabling it on routes or route groups.

Meta Tag Method

If you would like to prevent a certain page from caffeinating your application, then add the following meta tag:

<meta name="caffeinated" content="false">

Route Middleware Method

To enable this mode, you need to publish the configuration file (see the configuration section above) and then set use-route-middleware to true. This will disable the default global middleware mode (which applies it to any page that has the CSRF token in it across your entire application). Now you need to selectively enable Caffeine on a given route or route group using route middleware:

Route::any('test', 'TestController@test')->middleware('caffeinated');

Route::group(['middleware' => ['caffeinated']], function () {
    Route::any('test', 'TestController@test');
})

You can still use the route middleware method and apply it globally to all routes by editing app/Http/Kernel.php and adding it to the web middleware group. Although you should only use this option if you have a very specific use- case that prevents you from utilizing the default global middleware option.

This will only have effect if the page includes a form. If not, the page will not caffeinate your application anyway.

The Fine Print

Commitment to Quality

During package development I try as best as possible to embrace good design and development practices to try to ensure that this package is as good as it can be. My checklist for package development includes:

✅ Achieve as close to 100% code coverage as possible using unit tests.
✅ Eliminate any issues identified by SensioLabs Insight and Scrutinizer.
✅ Be fully PSR1, PSR2, and PSR4 compliant.
✅ Include comprehensive documentation in README.md.
✅ Provide an up-to-date CHANGELOG.md which adheres to the format outlined at https://keepachangelog.com.
✅ Have no PHPMD or PHPCS warnings throughout all code.

Contributing

Please observe and respect all aspects of the included Code of Conduct https://github.com/GeneaLabs/laravel-caffeine/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.

Reporting Issues

When reporting issues, please fill out the included template as completely as possible. Incomplete issues may be ignored or closed if there is not enough information included to be actionable.

Submitting Pull Requests

Please review the Contribution Guidelines https://github.com/GeneaLabs/laravel-caffeine/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md. Only PRs that meet all criterium will be accepted.

❤️ Open-Source Software - Give ⭐️

We have included the awesome symfony/thanks composer package as a dev dependency. Let your OS package maintainers know you appreciate them by starring the packages you use. Simply run composer thanks after installing this package. (And not to worry, since it's a dev-dependency it won't be installed in your live environment.)

laravel-caffeineKeeping Your Laravel Forms Awake.