Canonical URLs for Laravel
This blog post was originally published a little while ago. Please consider that it may no longer be relevant or even accurate.
One thing I've had to do with most Laravel apps is handle the redirect from www. to non-www. or vice-versa. Many people may choose to handle this in their web server stack (where it's likely to be faster) but I generally prefer to handle this in the app. It makes the app more portable (this logic isn't tied to a web server configuration) and it's more accesible to the developers.
However I noticed I was copy-pasting middleware over and then just changing the expected domain name. Because of this I decided to break out a new package - watson/canonical - a lightweight and easily configurable middleware that makes it easy to handle these sort of subdomain and HTTP/HTTPS redirects.
So if you need a painless way to ensure all your visitors are redirected to the HTTPS version of your site with a www. subdomain take a look at watson/canonical now.
