Laravel 5.2 Session values not persisting even when web middleware is used

Question

I've got a Laravel 5.2 project that I'm using as a mock API for a javascript client I'm building out. The mock API functionality will be replaced with a different Laravel project later. For now, I just need to be able to submit API calls and get expected responses.

In my mock API I'm storing the authentication status in the session.

The problem I'm running into is that the values I put into the session are not persisting between http calls.

This seemed similar to a different stackoverflow post I found, but the thing is I'm already using the web middleware for my API group.

I thought it may be a permissions on my storage folder (I'm using the default file session driver), vagrant is the owner and has write access:

Plus if it was a permissions issue I would think it would generate a runtime error.

Is there something else I'm missing?

EDIT

Here's the contents of Config::get('session'):

And yep, the StartSession class is included in the web middleware group:

Here's a shot of the browser session cookie vs the session file being created on the web server:

Here's the content of the request:

Answer 1

I had the same issue and was able to get it to work by replacing

Route::group(['middleware' => ['web']], function () {
   ...
});

with

Route::group(['middlewareGroups' => ['web']], function () {
   ...
});

No idea why this works though when all the documentation suggests that we use ['middleware' => ['web']]

Answer 2

One thing that did the trick for me was to make sure that domain in config/session.php is set to null.