Throttling submission of form in Laravel
You might face a scenario where you’d want to restrict a user from submitting a form within a certain time limit. i.e to prevent spamming by users.
For instance, let’s say, you want to restrict a user to submit a form only once in a timeframe of five minutes. This could be a public message board. If he/she tries to submit the form again in the next five minutes, they won’t be able to. How would you do that?
Well, Laravel’s custom validation rules or rule objects can be put to use here.
Create a new rule
For this, we can create a new rule called ThrottleSubmission using the following command like so.
$ php artisan make:rule ThrottleSubmission
This will create a new class called ThrottleSubmission in the app/Rules directory. Here’s in the passes() method, you can write the logic that will check if the user is submitting the form in 5 minutes multiple times like so.
<?php
namespace App\Rules;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Validation\Rule;
use App\User;
class ThrottleSubmission implements Rule
{
protected $user;
public function __construct(User $user)
{
$this->user = $user;
}
/**
* Determine if the validation rule passes.
*
* @param string $attribute
* @param mixed $value
* @return bool
*/
public function passes($attribute, $value)
{
return $this->user->latestMessage != null ? $this->user->latestMessage->created_at->lt(
now()->subMinutes(5)
): null;
}
/**
* Get the validation error message.
*
* @return string
*/
public function message()
{
return 'Try submitting after some time.';
}
}
Applying the rule
Once done, you can attach this rule to a validator by passing an instance of the rule object with your other validation rules on the input field like so.
use App\Rules\ThrottleSubmission;
$request->validate([
'message' => [
'required',
'string',
new ThrottleSubmission
],
]);
And this will essentially prevent the user from submitting a message multiple times in the span of five minutes!
I learned about this slick trick from The 6 Stages of Spam Protection by Jeffrey Way.
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