donmbelembe

I recently had the need to write a small url shortening application. I am aware that this problem has been solved quite a few times before, but what is being a developer if not reinventing the wheel just for the heck of it? Custom CMS anyone?

Knowing that this was going to be a tiny RESTful API and also knowing that Laravel 5.2 had API rate limiting built in, I was eager to give it a try. Taylor Otwell being Taylor Otwell shipped 5.2 with the rate limiting defaults set up out of the box and I had my application building out short url's in a matter of minutes. The problem for me came when I wanted to start associating those short urls with a user.

Typically my applications have a UI and authentication is done through a simple login page. Obviously for a RESTful API, having a login page isn't ideal. Instead, my hope was to have users append an api_token to the end of their query string and use that to auth

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	"name": "Don Mbelembe",
	"label": "Programmer",
	"picture": "",
	"email": "[email protected]",
	"phone": "+243 904094051",
	"website": "",
	"summary": "Passionate Software Engineer with more than 4 years of professional experience building web applications. Excelling in full-stack development, particularly the Laravel (PHP) + Vue.js stack and Python language.",
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	Quick tip for handling CSRF Token Expiration - common issue is when you use csrf protection is that if
	a form sits there for a while (like a login form, but any the same) the csrf token in the form will
	expire & throw a strange error.

	Handling it is simple, and is a good lesson for dealing with other types of errors in a custom manner.

	In Middleware you will see a file VerifyCsrfToken.php and be tempted to handle things there. DON'T!
	Instead, look at your app/Exceptions/Handler.php, at the render($request, Exception $e) function.

	All of your exceptions go through here, unless you have excluded them in the $dontReport array at the

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