Login with the Built-In Laravel 5 Scaffolding

Let’s look at the built in scaffolding (controllers, and views) that Laravel comes with to help speed up our login process. This scaffolding comes with many parts to get our authentication up and running. We actually don’t even have to write a single line of code.
This scaffolding comes with:

• Auth controller
• Routing
• Views with Styling

Getting Started

Go ahead and get Laravel installed and get your environment setup including your database connection. We suggest using Scotch Box or Laravel Homestead.
Once you can see Laravel in the browser, you’re good to go!

Routing

When starting up a Laravel application, the routing file (app/Http/routes.php) is going to be one of the first files we dive into. If you go look at the default routes file, you can see that Laravel has already wired up the routes for the built-in authentication.

Route::controllers([
    'auth' => 'Auth\AuthController',
    'password' => 'Auth\PasswordController',
]);

The AuthController will be in charge of user registration and logging users in while the PasswordController will handle resetting forgotten passwords.
Another thing to note is that since we are routing the controller to 'auth', then all the routes on that controller will be nested under /auth/. For example, our route will be http://laravel.app/auth/login.
Both of these routes are implicit controllers. This means that the routing is defined by the controller itself. All you need to do is add the HTTP verb in your method and Laravel will handle the routing.

AuthController

If we look in the Auth\AuthController (located at app/Http/Controllers/Auth/AuthController.php), another file is referenced that has a trait: Illuminate\Foundation\Auth\AuthenticatesAndRegistersUsers. This is a file that you won’t change and if you want to customize this whole process, the views are your main choice.
If we dig deeper and look into that file, we’ll be able to see there are the following methods and routes:
We don’t have to do anything else since the routing, views, authentication mechanisms, and controllers are there for us. Let’s try out some of the features of the built-in scaffolding and try to register a user.
If we go ahead and try to register our user at http://laravel.app/auth/register, we will have have problems since we haven’t fully set our database up yet.

Database Migrations

This error happens because we don’t yet have the tables in our database. How can we save a user to the database if there is no user table? We will need to create a migration to create our user table.
Luckily for us, the migrations are also included in the scaffolding! We just have to SSH into our VM, find the root folder of our application, and run the migration.

# ssh into our vm
$ homestead ssh

# find our directory
$ cd laravel

# run the migrations
$ php artisan migrate

Registering

Let’s go back to that registration form and try again. Fill in the form and we won’t see that error anymore.
We can also use a tool like Navicat to browse through our MySQL database. We’ll see that there are three new tables including a users, password_resets, and migrations table.
Click into the users table and you can see the new user created with the hashed password.

Logging In

Now that our user is in the database, let’s go check to be sure our login works. Try entering the wrong email or password and you’ll receive an error.
If we enter in the correct credentials, then we get taken back to the home page and see the logged in message we saw after we registered the user.

Conclusion

Without writing a single line of code, we have a fully functioning login and authentication setup! Keep in mind that these are used to get you up and running as quick as possible since all the pieces are wired together and styled for you. If you want to implement a different setup then you’ll either have to build it yourself (which we’ll look at in the next parts of this series) or just go about changing the styling.