Laravel 5.6 Login, Register, Activation with Username or Email Support

This is another interesting blog post about Laravel 5.6 login, register with username or email support. I've already published two articles about customizing the laravel authentication process. In this article, I will be helping you to build following things below, with Laravel v5.6.

• Adding username support on default register, login process.
• Activating user after the registration process is completed via email.
• Disabling default login after register, only allowing to log in for the activated user.
• Using Laravel notification to send email to the user about registration.

To follow this article you should have existing or fresh laravel setup with version 5.6, as you will be seeing some codes samples only supporting this particular version and they may not be compatible with other older versions.

The regular laravel installation comes without auth scaffolding with the recent releases, to generate the default auth scaffolding it ships with an artisan command out of the box.

If you haven't already generated them, use the below artisan command to populate them.

php artisan make:auth

Let's start with the additional routes for authentication under routes/web.php

Auth::routes();

Route::get('activate/{token}', 'Auth\RegisterController@activate')
    ->name('activate');

To add username support on register process, let's add few new fields in the migration file.

<?php

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;

class CreateUsersTable extends Migration
{
    /**
     * Run the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::create('users', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->increments('id');
            $table->string('name');
            $table->string('username')->unique();
            $table->string('email')->unique();
            $table->string('password');
            $table->string('token');
            $table->integer('active')->default(0);
            $table->rememberToken();
            $table->timestamps();
        });
    }

    /**
     * Reverse the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function down()
    {
        Schema::dropIfExists('users');
    }
}

We've added three new fields (username, token, active), to store unique username, activation token, active field to main active flag for users.

Now, updating model app/User.php with new fields.

<?php

namespace App;

use Illuminate\Foundation\Auth\User as Authenticatable;
use Illuminate\Notifications\Notifiable;

class User extends Authenticatable
{
    use Notifiable;

    const ACTIVE = 1;
    const INACTIVE = 0;

    /**
     * The attributes that are mass assignable.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    protected $fillable = [
        'name', 'username', 'email', 'password', 'token', 'active',
    ];

    /**
     * The attributes that should be hidden for arrays.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    protected $hidden = [
        'password', 'remember_token',
    ];
}

Register

Adding username field for a registration form inside resources/views/auth/register.blade.php

<div class="form-group row">
    <label for="username" class="col-md-4 col-form-label text-md-right">{{ __('Username') }}</label>

    <div class="col-md-6">
        <input id="username" type="text" class="form-control{{ $errors->has('username') ? ' is-invalid' : '' }}" name="username" value="{{ old('username') }}" required>

        @if ($errors->has('username'))
            <span class="invalid-feedback">
                <strong>{{ $errors->first('username') }}</strong>
            </span>
        @endif
    </div>
</div>

To view, the full source code for the registration form read the article up to end.

To make the username support coming through the registration form, we need to modify few methods inside the controller.

    // App\Http\Controllers\Auth\RegisterController.php
    
    /**
     * Get a validator for an incoming registration request.
     *
     * @param  array  $data
     * @return \Illuminate\Contracts\Validation\Validator
     */
    protected function validator(array $data)
    {
        return Validator::make($data, [
            'name' => 'required|string|max:255',
            'username' => 'required|string|max:20|unique:users',
            'email' => 'required|string|email|max:255|unique:users',
            'password' => 'required|string|min:6|confirmed',
        ]);
    }

    /**
     * Create a new user instance after a valid registration.
     *
     * @param  array  $data
     * @return \App\User
     */
    protected function create(array $data)
    {
        $user = User::create([
            'name' => $data['name'],
            'username' => $data['username'],
            'email' => $data['email'],
            'password' => Hash::make($data['password']),
            'token' => str_random(40) . time(),
        ]);

        $user->notify(new UserActivate($user));

        return $user;
    }

    /**
     * Handle a registration request for the application.
     *
     * @param  \Illuminate\Http\Request  $request
     * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response
     */
    public function register(Request $request)
    {
        $this->validator($request->all())->validate();

        event(new Registered($user = $this->create($request->all())));

        return redirect()->route('login')
            ->with(['success' => 'Congratulations! your account is registered, you will shortly receive an email to activate your account.']);
    }

    /**
     * @param $token
     */
    public function activate($token = null)
    {
        $user = User::where('token', $token)->first();

        if (empty($user)) {
            return redirect()->to('/')
                ->with(['error' => 'Your activation code is either expired or invalid.']);
        }

        $user->update(['token' => null, 'active' => User::ACTIVE]);

        return redirect()->route('login')
            ->with(['success' => 'Congratulations! your account is now activated.']);
    }

Let's point out the updates made in the above controller.

• We've added a validation rule for username field inside the validator() method.
• We've updated create() method to call a notification class to send an activation email to the user after registration is completed.
• Overriding register() method originally called from the RegistersUsers trait to protect from being auto-login to non-activated users.
• Also created new method activate() to allow activation to the new users.

We've added a new notification class, UserActivate.php to send an activation link to the users while they register their new account.

<?php

namespace App\Notifications;

use Illuminate\Bus\Queueable;
use Illuminate\Notifications\Messages\MailMessage;
use Illuminate\Notifications\Notification;

class UserActivate extends Notification
{
    use Queueable;

    /**
     * Create a new notification instance.
     *
     * @param $user
     * @return void
     */
    public function __construct($user)
    {
        $this->user = $user;
    }

    /**
     * Get the notification's delivery channels.
     *
     * @param  mixed  $notifiable
     * @return array
     */
    public function via($notifiable)
    {
        return ['mail'];
    }

    /**
     * Get the mail representation of the notification.
     *
     * @param  mixed  $notifiable
     * @return \Illuminate\Notifications\Messages\MailMessage
     */
    public function toMail($notifiable)
    {
        return (new MailMessage)
            ->from(env('ADMIN_MAIL_ADDRESS'))
            ->subject('Activate Account!')
            ->greeting(sprintf('Hi, %s', $this->user->name))
            ->line('We just noticed that you created a new account. You will need to activate your account to sign in into this account.')
            ->action('Activate', route('activate', [$this->user->token]))
            ->line('Thank you for using our application!');
    }

    /**
     * Get the array representation of the notification.
     *
     * @param  mixed  $notifiable
     * @return array
     */
    public function toArray($notifiable)
    {
        return [
            //
        ];
    }
}

The customization for registration process is finally done with above changes, now we will be looking at login process below.

Login

We've updated the file login.blade.php to add support for email or username. To make that addition we've changed the input type email to be text to support both username or email but the input type name remains same.

<div class="form-group row">
    <label for="email" class="col-sm-4 col-form-label text-md-right">{{ __('E-Mail / Username') }}</label>

    <div class="col-md-6">
        <input id="email" type="text" class="form-control{{ $errors->has('email') ? ' is-invalid' : '' }}" name="email" value="{{ old('email') }}" required autofocus>

        @if ($errors->has('email'))
            <span class="invalid-feedback">
                <strong>{{ $errors->first('email') }}</strong>
            </span>
        @endif
    </div>
</div>

Now, we're adding another method to the controller.

    // App\Http\Controllers\Auth\LoginController.php

    /**
     * Get the needed authorization credentials from the request.
     *
     * @param  \Illuminate\Http\Request  $request
     * @return array
     */
    protected function credentials(Request $request)
    {
        $field = $this->field($request);

        return [
            $field => $request->get($this->username()),
            'password' => $request->get('password'),
            'active' => User::ACTIVE,
        ];
    }

    /**
     * Determine if the request field is email or username.
     *
     * @param  \Illuminate\Http\Request  $request
     * @return string
     */
    public function field(Request $request)
    {
        $email = $this->username();

        return filter_var($request->get($email), FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) ? $email : 'username';
    }

    /**
     * Validate the user login request.
     *
     * @param  \Illuminate\Http\Request  $request
     * @return void
     */
    protected function validateLogin(Request $request)
    {
        $field = $this->field($request);

        $messages = ["{$this->username()}.exists" => 'The account you are trying to login is not activated or it has been disabled.'];

        $this->validate($request, [
            $this->username() => "required|exists:users,{$field},active," . User::ACTIVE,
            'password' => 'required',
        ], $messages);
    }

Let's point out what has changed inside the controller above.

• The method credentials(), originally called from AuthenticatesUsers trait which collects credential to attempt the authentication is now overridden to the controller.
• The field username or email is determined inside the credentials() method.
• Added active field in the authentication process.

After updating the above files the login process also now supports username or email.

Thanks for reading this article up to the end, please don't forget to give your feedback in the comment section below.

Happy Coding!