Redirect trailing slashes in Laravel 5

Laravel 5 is finally here!

And my first task on the fresh new framework is to redirect away from trailing slashes. Laravel provides you with a .htaccess file to handle this for you if you're using Apache, but it's not handled for Nginx users. Furthermore, neither Homestead nor Forge will handle it for you. You could go edit your Nginx config, but I find that a pain when I've got an app deployed over multiple servers (I like to think of my Forge instances as always replaceable, so I'd rather keep configuration in my app as much as possble).

Here's my first middleware, RedirectTrailingSlash. Simply fix the namespace, pop it into your Laravel 5 project and then add it to your kernel. Too easy. Now any URL that ends in / will be 301 redirected to the path without the trailing slash, keeping things clean and simple!

<?php namespace App\Http\Middleware;

use Closure;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Redirect;
use Illuminate\Support\Str;

class RedirectTrailingSlash {

    /**
     * Handle an incoming request.
     *
     * @param  \Illuminate\Http\Request  $request
     * @param  \Closure  $next
     * @return mixed
     */
    public function handle($request, Closure $next)
    {
        if (preg_match('/.+\/$/', $request->getRequestUri()))
        {
            return Redirect::to(rtrim($request->getRequestUri(), '/'), 301);
        }

        return $next($request);
    }

}