Temporarily disable / bypass Middleware

Question

In my Application I implemented a OAuth2-Server (oauth2-server-laravel) in combination with a custom Authentication Package (Sentinel by Cartalyst).

In my routes.php:

Route::group(['before' => 'oauth'], function()
{
    // ... some routes here
}

So the request must provide an authorization header or the application quits with an OAuthException.

Now I want to unittest my controllers. So I have to seed my database with a OAuth session and access token for every test. Then overwrite the call()-method of TestCase and set the HTTP-Authorization Header with the Bearer Token.

Is there a way to disable or bypass middleware (in my case just for unit testing)?

In Laravel 4 they were called route filters and they were disabled in the testing environment anyway. You could also manually enable/disable them with Route::enableFilters().

Answer 1

Apparently with the release of Laravel 5.1 yesterday a disableMiddleware() method was added to the TestCase class, which now does exactly what I wanted.

Problem solved. :)

Answer 2

The only answer that I could come up with was to put a bypass in the actual middleware itself. For example:

public function handle($request, Closure $next)
{
    // Don't validate authentication when testing.
    if (env('APP_ENV') === 'testing') {
        return $next($request);
    }
    // ... continue on to process the request
}

I don't like the idea of making the middleware dependent on the app environment but I couldn't see any other options.

Answer 3

Here's a package that I worked on after having the same issue.

https://github.com/moon0326/FakeMiddleware