How to Log every request & response in Laravel 5

Hello Everyone,

Today we will discuss about how to log every request & response in Laravel 5.1.

Sometimes it's useful to log some/all requests to our application. This is really convenient when we use Laravel to build our APIs.

A logging middleware might log all incoming requests to our application. In Laravel 5.1 there is a terminate method and it's call after the sending HTTP response to the browser. This way we have access to both $request and $response at the same time.

Let's take a look at how we are going to achieve this in Laravel 5.1:

Create a new middleware by typing this command in terminal inside our project directory.

php artisan make:middleware LogAfterRequest

And then put below code in it(project_dir/app/Http/Middleware/LogAfterRequest.php).

<?php

namespace App\Http\Middleware;

use Closure;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Log;

class LogAfterRequest {

    public function handle($request, Closure $next)
    {
        return $next($request);
    }

    public function terminate($request, $response)
    {
        Log::info('app.requests', ['request' => $request->all(), 'response' => $response]);
    }

}

In this code terminate method receives $request and $response. These are objects which will give us all of the handy stuffs we probably need to log.

When we have our middleware ready, we should add it to our HTTP Kernel.

Open Kernel.php and add this line to our protected $middleware property:

\App\Http\Middleware\LogAfterRequest::class

That's it. We can additionally filter what we want to actually log, but this is the basics.

Thanks.