Excluding Routes from the CSRF Middleware

Laravel has CSRF enabled by default for all requests that come through your app. This is included and handled automatically to make life easier.

However, one issue that comes up is when you are using external services where you do not have the ability to set a token. An example of this is with web hooks from third parties. In previous versions of Laravel to allow this on a per route basis was convoluted. For an example here is a tutorial on how it would have to be done in 5.0

Now with 5.1 the app/Http/Middleware/VerifyCsrfToken class has an $except array property to make this super simple:

protected $except = [
 'webhook/*'
];

As you can see from the example, you can utilize wildcards for route matching or define each one individually. Internally, this array is ran through $request->is and you can find more details about that in the requests documentation. To find out more about Laravel’s CSRF check out the official documentation.