Laravel 5 rydurham/sentinal: post-login, redirect based on group membership

Question

I have a Laravel 5.1 app using Sentinal for security. Right now we're just using the two stock groups, Users and Admins. Recently I invited a colleague to start testing my app, so I created a user for him. I forgot to add him to the Admins group. When he logged on in infinite redirect loop started because the authentication redirect sends users to a route called home, but you can't load home if you aren't in Admins, and get redirected back to login. Which redirects you back to home.

This is a business rule, we only want Admins using the part of the app that they need to authenticate to, but we'd like to do something friendlier than sending a 403 if you aren't an Admin. I would like to send Authenticated Users to a specific route, or even just redirect them to a static page.

I think I've almost worn out Google trying to get a clue about how to do this. Seems like this should be easy-peasy. I could start hacking the vendor code, but I can't believe that there isn't a more graceful way to do this.

Sorry if this is a dumb question. I'm fairly new to Laravel.

Answer 1

OK folks, I got this working. I wrote a piece of middleware called RedirectIfNotAdmin.

I couldn't find a Sentry or Guard property/method that could tell me about group membership, so I made plain ol' eloquent models for my users and groups tables. I created a many-to-many between those models. In my middleware I use Sentry to get a user id, with that I instantiate one of my own User models. In my User model I implemented a method isAdmin() which gets the groups for the User and returns true if one of them is 'Admins'.

If that isAdmin() method returns false, I redirect to a page that explains that the user doesn't have permissions.

Quite a bit more elaborate solution than what I expected I would need to write. I really thought rydurham/sentinal would have this pretty much solved. Maybe Sentinal does have a cleaner solution and I'm too dense to find it. If anybody would like to comment on a better way to solve this, I'm all ears.