Redirect after login or register in Laravel: Adding a custom method

Laravel built-in authentication system has a $redirectTo property that you can use to customize where the user will be redirected after successful login/registration. But we can customize even more than that.

By default, app/Http/Controllers/Auth/RegisterController.php has the $redirectTo property.

class RegisterController extends Controller
{
    ...
    protected $redirectTo = '/home';
    ...
}

This means that the user will be redirected to /home after successful registration.

Same property also exists in app/Http/Controllers/Auth/LoginController.php which we can use to change where a user will be redirected after successful login.

What if we want to use different redirect path for different users based on certain conditions?

We can also use a method to add some logic to decide the redirect path for the user. We can define a method redirectTo that will overwrite the $redirectTo property.

class RegisterController extends Controller
{
    public function redirectTo()
    {
        if (auth()->user()->is_admin) {
            return '/admin/dashboard';
        } else if (auth()->user()->is_authenticated) {
            return '/app';
        } else {
            return '/home';
        }
    }
}

We can do the same thing in LoginController.php file as well to decide the return path after successful login.

Internal Implementation

Let’s see how it works internally. After every successful login/registration, laravel redirects to the path returned from redirectPath method. This method is available in the trait RedirectsUsers. This trait is implemented by both RegisterController.php and LoginController.php. This method works in this way. If the method redirectPath is available, it calls the method and returns its return value. Otherwise, it simply returns the $redirectTo property. Here is the actual trait file.

<?php

namespace Illuminate\Foundation\Auth;

trait RedirectsUsers
{
    /**
     * Get the post register / login redirect path.
     *
     * @return string
     */
    public function redirectPath()
    {
        if (method_exists($this, 'redirectTo')) {
            return $this->redirectTo();
        }

        return property_exists($this, 'redirectTo') ? $this->redirectTo : '/home';
    }
}

Learn more about authentication in the laravel official documentation.