Validation error in Laravel - $errors array does not get populated after the validation failure

Question

I've ran into a strange issue regarding validations in Laravel 5.2. I reviewed following questions on StackOverflow, but none of them seems to apply to my case:

Laravel validation not showing errors

Laravel Validation not returning error

The thing is, that I am trying to validate a title field, before persisting the Card object into the database. When I submit the form with an empty title field, as expected, It doesn't pass the validations. However, the $errors array doesn't get populated upon failure of the mentioned validations. Can anybody explain where am I going wrong with this code?

/////////////////////// CONTROLLER /////////////////////
public function create(Request $request)
{
    $this->validate($request, [
        'title' => 'required|min:10'
    ]);

    Card::create($request->all());
    return back();
}

///////////////////////// VIEW /////////////////////////
// Show errors, if any. (never gets triggered)
@if(count($errors))
    <ul>
        @foreach($errors->all() as $error)
            <li>{{ $error }}</li>
        @endforeach
    </ul>
@endif

<form method="POST" action="/cards">
    {{ csrf_field() }}

    <div class="form-group">
        // The textarea does not get populated with the 'old' value as well
        <textarea class="form-control" name="title">{{ old('title') }}</textarea>
    </div>

    <div class="form-group">
        <button class="btn btn-primary" type="submit">Add Card</button>
    </div>
</form>

Answer 1

If you are running Laravel 5.2.27 and up, you no longer need to use the web middleware group. In fact, you shouldn't add it to your routes because it's now automatically applied by default.

If you open up your app/Http/RouteServiceProvider.php file, you will see this bit of code:

protected function mapWebRoutes(Router $router)
{
    $router->group([
        'namespace' => $this->namespace, 'middleware' => 'web',
    ], function ($router) {
        require app_path('Http/routes.php');
    });
}

Source: https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/master/app/Providers/RouteServiceProvider.php#L53

As you can see, it's automatically applying the web middleware for you. If you try to apply it again (more than once) in your routes file, you'll run into weird problems like what you are currently facing.

In order to find out the version of Laravel that you are running, run this command: php artisan --version