Laravel class property not returning in response

Question

I'm creating an API for a blog using Laravel and in my UserController, for some routes, I get the currently authenticated user as seen below:

public function getUser() {
$user = auth()->user();
return response()->json($user, 200);
}

This returns a json object of the user. I get the user in other functions in the same way. I wanted to move this line into a wider scope so I could access it in all functions so I placed it in the constructor:

    class UserController extends Controller {
        protected $user;
        public function __construct() {
          $this->user = auth()->user();
        }
      }

I refactored getUser to look like this;

public function getUser() {
    return response()->json($this->user, 200);
    }

Now it just returns an empty object and the 200 status code. Why does making it a class property no longer return the object?

Answer 1

The session middleware has not ran yet; the Controller is instantiated before the Request goes through the middleware stack, so you won't have access to session based authentication at that point (so auth()->user() would be null). You can use a Controller middleware to do this though:

class UserController extends Controller
{
    protected $user;

    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->middleware(function ($request, $next) {
            $this->user = $request->user();

            return $next($request);
        });
    }
}

This middleware will run after the other middleware in the stack so you will have access to the session at that point.