Goal

Prevent forms from timing out when submitting them after leaving them on-screen for a considerable amount of time. (Laravel defaults to 120 minutes, but that is configurable and could be different site-by-site.)

Implementation

To achieve this, we are sending a caffeine-drip (a request at regular intervals) to keep the session from timing out. This is only implemented on pages with a _token field, so all other pages will time-out as normal.

Reasoning

I chose this approach to keep the integrity of site-security, by avoiding the following:

• exposing the CSRF Token on an unsecured endpoint.
• eliminating CSRF Token validation on specific routes, or even altogether.
• removing session-timeout on all pages.

Considerations

Routes

This package adds the routes under genealabs/laravel-caffeine. Please verify that these don't collide with your existing routes.

Dependencies

• Your project should be running Laravel 5.1.

Installation

1. Install Caffeine via composer:

composer require genealabs/laravel-caffeine:~0.2

2. Add the service provider entry in config\app.php:

        GeneaLabs\LaravelCaffeine\LaravelCaffeineServiceProvider::class,

3. Register the middleware class in app/Http/kernel.php:

    protected $middleware = [
        // other entries above
        \GeneaLabs\LaravelCaffeine\Http\Middleware\LaravelCaffeineDripMiddleware::class,
  ];

Configuration

To change the default drip interval of 5 minutes, simply publish the configuration file:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=genealabs-laravel-caffeine

You can now change the default value in /app/config/genealabs-laravel-caffeine.php as desired. Deleting the /app/config/genealabs-laravel-caffeine.php file will revert back to the default 5-minute interval.

Usage

That was it! It will apply itself automatically where it finds a form with a _token field while pages are open in browsers.