"required_without" validation rule not working as expected

$this->validate($request, [
    'image_url' => ['required_without:image_upload', 'sometimes', 'nullable', 'active_url'],
    'image_upload' => ['required_without:image_url', 'sometimes', 'nullable', 'image'],
]);

Thanks! It works, but why?

The required without documentation states:

required_without:foo,bar,...

The field under validation must be present and not empty only when any of the other specified fields are not present.

So, in this case, image_url must be present and not empty only when image_upload is not present.

What am I missing? Could you please explain it? And why are sometimes and nullable necessary?

You can read this article

https://blog.infyom.com/use-of-required-without-validation-rule-in-laravel

Thanks for the answer but I still don't understand why sometimes and nullable are necessary. After running some tests, I concluded that this is enough:

$this->validate($request, [
    'image_url' => ['required_without:image_upload', 'nullable', 'active_url'],
    'image_upload' => ['required_without:image_url', 'image'],
]);

Apparently, if you provide an image url, it doesn't check the image upload. So far, so good.

If you provide an image upload, it still checks active_url on the image url and throws an error, since the image_url is present but empty. However, after adding nullable, it goes through and gives no error. No clue why it behaves like this.

Yeah it could be enough to use just nullable.

But still, according to the required without documentation, it shouldn't even check image_url if image_upload is provided...

I think I figured out why nullable is still required: because when I leave the textbox image_url empty, it's not null, it's empty. So, while it's still not required because there's the image upload, the validation still sees it as being non-null and thus checks if it's an active url. I guess nullable here means either not set or set to empty.