Track Your Users Last Activity in Laravel

• The setup
• The middleware
  • Logic
  • Registration

Although there's many ways to do this in Laravel, the simplest way is with a piece of web middleware.

#The setup

When an authenticated user visits a route in our application, we want to store the timestamp in the database for use later on. Let's store it in a column called last_active_at.

All you need to do is create a migration:

php artisan make:migration add_last_active_at_to_users_table --table=users

And add the following line in the up() method:

$table->timestamp('last_active_at')->nullable();

If the user has never visited a route, it will remain NULL in the database.

We also want to make sure this field is "fillable", so add last_active_at to the protected $fillable array on your User model.

As well as being able to update last_active_at using User::update(), we want to cast it to a Carbon\Carbon instance when using it so that we can make use of time comparison methods.

#The middleware

#Logic

The middleware will be responsible for checking the authentication status and updating the last_active_at column.

namespace App\Http\Middleware;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Closure;

class TrackLastActiveAt
{
    public function handle(Request $request, Closure $next)
    {
        if (! $request->user()) {
            return $next($request);
        }

        if (! $request->user()->last_active_at || $request->user()->last_active_at->isPast()) {
            $request->user()->update([
                'last_active_at' => now(),
            ]);
        }

        return $next($request);
    }
}

Here's what happens in order:

1. We check the current user is authenticated. If they're not, we're returning early so that the rest of the middleware has no effect.
2. If the current user last_active_at date & time is NULL or is in the past, we want to update it using the current date and time. Thankfully, Laravel has a now() helper function that returns an instance of Carbon\Carbon for the current date and time.
3. Forward the current request on to the next middleware.

#Registration

We have a couple of different options for registering the middleware. If you want to track your users activity across all routes, it should be registered under the web array in App\Http\Kernel:

protected $middlewareGroups = [
    'web' => [
        // ...
        \App\Http\Middleware\TrackLastActiveAt::class,
    ]
]

If you only want to track the latest activity for particular routes, you can register the middleware as part of your route registration:

Route::get('/foo', 'FooController')->middleware([\App\Http\Middleware\TrackLastActiveAt::class]);