How to check in a Vue component if a user is authenticated in Laravel?

Question

As the title states, I'm a little confused how I would tackle a method in my Vue Component with if/else statement based on if the user is logged in and authenticated with Laravel's Auth facade. I'm making various Axios requests which I need to allow/disallow based on if user logged in.

I have VUEX setup and was thinking that I can use local storage somehow to have a state for isLoggedin for example that works with Laravel. But I don't know if this is correct method, or secure and presumably Laravel is already storing it's authentication. So can I just access that direct in Vue?

Some unclean solutions here that I don't think are the best - https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/vue/hide-button-if-user-is-logged-with-laravel-and-vuejs

I can not find any examples for this :(

Answer 1

Usually from your controller, you pass the authenticated user object into the view which will then be stored in a javascript variable

Controller:

public function index()
{
    return view('index', [
        'auth_user' => Auth::user()
    ]);
}

You will know if a user is authenticated if it returns an object or null where null means no user is authenticated.

In your blade, assign the auth_user into a javascript variable:

<script>
    window.auth_user = {!! json_encode($auth_user); !!};
</script>

your vuex store object should atleast look like this:

{
    state: {
        user: null
    },
    mutations: {
        setAuthUser(state, user) {
            state.user = user;
        }
    },
    getters: {
        isLoggedIn(state) {
            return state.user !== null;
        }
    }
}

Then in your Vue root component, get the auth_user and save it into the store:

<script>
    export default {

        mounted() {
            this.$store.commit('setAuthUser', window.auth_user);
        }

    }
</script>

You now basically have a getter called this.$store.getters.isLoggedIn that you can use in your application for checking if a user is currently logged in.

e.g: