How to Disable Laravel from Sending Empty Cookies in Responses

Learn how to effectively stop Laravel from sending empty cookies with responses using middleware, ensuring your Varnish cache works optimally for stateless requests.
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This video is based on the question https://stackoverflow.com/q/75458471/ asked by the user 'Maurizio' ( https://stackoverflow.com/u/1916292/ ) and on the answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/75622543/ provided by the user 'Questioner' ( https://stackoverflow.com/u/10131324/ ) at 'Stack Overflow' website. Thanks to these great users and Stackexchange community for their contributions.

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How to Disable Laravel from Sending Empty Cookies in Responses

When using Laravel for your web applications, you might have noticed that responses sometimes include cookies even when they are empty. This can be redundant and lead to a less efficient use of your caching solutions, such as Varnish. Especially for users navigating through static pages, sending unnecessary cookies can have a negative impact on cache performance. In this post, we will explore how to create a middleware in Laravel to disable the sending of empty cookies in responses.

The Problem: Unwanted Cookies in Responses

In an application where responses are cached, sending empty cookies can impede the functionality of tools like Varnish that rely on performance optimizations. For instance:

Userland-Generated Data: Typically, a standard cookie could include items like _token, _csrf, and more, which are only necessary when user-specific sessions or data are present.

Cache Performance: Caching becomes less effective when responses carry unnecessary data, which can slow down response times and affect resource usage.

The ultimate goal is to ensure that when unauthenticated users are accessing your website's 20,000+ static pages, Laravel should not send a Set-Cookie header when it’s not required.

The Solution: Create Middleware to Control Cookie Sending

To tackle this issue, we will create a custom middleware in Laravel. This middleware will check the response before it's sent back to the user. If certain conditions are met (i.e., no user-specific data), it will prevent Laravel from sending any cookies along with the response.

Step-by-Step Guide

Create the Middleware:
You can create a new middleware using Artisan command. Run the following command in your terminal:

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Implement the Middleware Logic:
Open the newly created middleware file located at app/Http/Middleware/DisableEmptyCookies.php. You will need to edit it as follows:

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Step 3: Register the Middleware

After implementing your middleware, it needs to be registered within the app/Http/Kernel.php file. This could either be registered as a global middleware or assigned to specific routes:

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Step 4: Test Your Configuration

To ensure that your middleware is functioning correctly:

Use Varnish Logs to monitor the requests and responses to verify that empty cookies are no longer being sent.

You can run the following command:

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

This command will help identify any content that should be cached or is uncacheable due to lingering cookies.

Optional: Handling User-Specific Content

If you're also interested in caching user-specific content while efficiently managing cookies, we can dive deeper into authentication handling with Varnish. The methods can certainly become more complex when dealing with individual user sessions versus stateless browsing.

Conclusion

Creating a middleware in Laravel to disable the sending of empty cookies can lead to a significant improvement in the performance of your caching solution—especially when it comes to serving static content to users without authentication. By implementing this simple solution, you can ensure that your application behaves efficiently and serves users better.

Now you’re equipped to modify Laravel’s behavior for cookie management, enhancing both performance and the user experience on your site.

Happy coding!

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