Forcing JSON-only responses in Laravel

Forcing JSON-only responses in Laravel

In a case where you are trying to use Laravel as the framework for an API-only backend, you might want to force returning JSON responses.

This can be useful because if the client does not specify the Accept: application/json header in the request, Laravel will return a HTML response for things like validation errors.

If you would like to force JSON only responses, you should create a global middleware and register it. Here's an example of the middleware:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Middleware;

use Closure;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class EnsureAcceptJsonRequest
{
    /**
     * Handle an incoming request.
     *
     * @param  \Illuminate\Http\Request  $request
     * @param  \Closure  $next
     * @return mixed
     */
    public function handle(Request $request, Closure $next)
    {
        $request->headers->set('Accept', 'application/json');

        return $next($request);
    }
}

With this, you requests will always return JSON responses. Of course this still depends on returning actual JSON in the response of your controller.

Posts