Laravel redirect to intended location after login

Interesting tidbit I discovered over the weekend when using the auth filter in Laravel 4 to redirect users where they had originally intended to go. Before I had found this, I was passing the intended location encoded in the URL and then picking it up in the login form, which in hindsight was pretty darn silly.

Route::filter('auth', function()
{
    if ( ! Auth::check()) return Redirect::guest('login');
}

If you actually look at the definition of the guest function of the redirector, you'll see that the intended location is actually saved into the session.

public function guest($path, $status = 302, $headers = array(), $secure = null)
{
    $this->session->put('url.intended', $this->generator->full());

    return $this->to($path, $status, $headers, $secure);
}

And furthermore, the redirector also has a simple function that can perform a redirect to that intended location.

public function intended($default, $status = 302, $headers = array(), $secure = null)
{
$path = $this->session->get('url.intended', $default);

    $this->session->forget('url.intended');

    return $this->to($path, $status, $headers, $secure);

}

This way, after having a user login, it's really easy to shoot them off to where they intended to go without having to write all your own code.

return Redirect::intended('/');

You need to pass a default location in case an intended location isn't provided in the session (which in this case would be the homepage). It's a really neat trick, I wish it was better documented, but it's always nice to stumble upon cute things like this by accident.