How to Validate Birth Dates in Laravel to Ensure Users Are at Least 18 Years Old

Learn how to use Laravel's validation to check that users are at least 18 years old by validating their birth dates with Carbon functionality.
---
This video is based on the question https://stackoverflow.com/q/68596701/ asked by the user 'mikefolu' ( https://stackoverflow.com/u/12510040/ ) and on the answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/68596738/ provided by the user 'Tim Lewis' ( https://stackoverflow.com/u/3965631/ ) at 'Stack Overflow' website. Thanks to these great users and Stackexchange community for their contributions.

Visit these links for original content and any more details, such as alternate solutions, latest updates/developments on topic, comments, revision history etc. For example, the original title of the Question was: Laravel - Validate birth date 18 years before today in rules request

Also, Content (except music) licensed under CC BY-SA https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/licensing
The original Question post is licensed under the 'CC BY-SA 4.0' ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ ) license, and the original Answer post is licensed under the 'CC BY-SA 4.0' ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ ) license.

If anything seems off to you, please feel free to write me at vlogize [AT] gmail [DOT] com.
---
Validating Birth Dates in Laravel: Ensuring Users are at Least 18 Years Old

When building applications, particularly those that involve user registration, we must ensure that users meet certain age requirements. Particularly, if your application needs users to be at least 18 years old, validating their birth dates is a crucial step in the registration process. In this guide, we'll tackle how to validate a user's birth date in Laravel, ensuring they are at least 18 years old.

The Problem: Birth Date Validation

In Laravel 8, you can perform form request validation to ensure that input fields meet specific criteria. One common scenario is validating a user's birth date to ensure they are old enough. This includes requiring the birth date to be not only a valid date but also less than or equal to today’s date minus 18 years.

Here's how we can do this using Laravel's request validation:

Implementing Basic Validation Rules

The initial rules may look something like this:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

However, this is not quite sufficient for ensuring that users are at least 18 years old. We need to refine our validation rules for this purpose.

The Solution: Using Carbon in Laravel

Laravel provides a powerful date and time manipulation library called Carbon. This library simplifies working with dates in your application, allowing us to easily subtract years and format dates.

Steps to Validate Birth Date

To ensure that a birth date is at least 18 years prior to the current date, follow these steps:

Include the Carbon Class: Make sure to include Carbon at the top of your file:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Update the Rules Method: Modify your rules to incorporate Carbon's functionality. Here's how the complete rules method would look:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Breaking Down the New Validation Rule

required: The birth date field is mandatory.

date_format:Y-m-d: This rule checks that the input is a valid date in the specified Y-m-d format.

before:: Using the before: rule, we compare the input date against the date that is calculated to be 18 years ago from today.

This validation rule generates a date string similar to before:2003-07-30 (assuming today's date is July 30, 2021). Consequently, if a user is older than 18 years today, their input birth date will pass the validation checks.

Conclusion

Validating a user's birth date in Laravel is essential for ensuring the safety and legality of your application. By utilizing the power of Carbon to compute dates, you can effectively enforce age requirements with simple and elegant validation rules.

Make sure to implement these changes in your form request to leverage Laravel’s robust validation features, ensuring that your users meet the age requirement effortlessly. Happy coding!

Видео How to Validate Birth Dates in Laravel to Ensure Users Are at Least 18 Years Old канала vlogize