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webkenny's avatar

Login Does Not Maintain Session, Registration Does

Such an odd issue I'm having. I am building a super simple single-form app with the default authentication provider in Laravel. So I am using the AuthController and its cohorts including the registration and login form provided. Here is the behavior:

  • If I register for an account, the session is maintained and I can access the protected route with no issue.
  • If I log out then login again or let the session expire naturally, I can not maintain a session. It's not a password issue because I went ahead and tried to give it the wrong password on purpose and got the normal "This does not match our records" or some such message.

Really the only thing to note is I am using UUIDs as the user_id via a isUnique trait from an article I found last year. I've done this before in an API and had no issues logging in. Granted, using JWT and not traditional forms but same concept.

In my constructor for the controller with the protected route I use the default call:

$this->middleware('auth');

Again, this works fine if I register. It's only when I try to login a second time that I cannot maintain the session.

I'm using the File session driver since this is all local development if that matters at all.

Thanks folks! Any ideas?

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3 replies
webkenny's avatar

Well, believe it or not, this has everything to do with using UUID as a primary key on the user model. I can't tell you why and didn't have the countless hours to debug it but, if anyone else runs into this, that's probably your culprit.

I love Laravel with all my heart but, boy, if you try to do anything different than what it has planned... Good luck!

Snapey's avatar

Did you set incrementing false on the user model?

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webkenny's avatar

Thanks for your reply! I did, actually. It is part of the trait. But for good measure, I went ahead and added it to the model as well. I wonder if maybe something changed in 5.2 because this totally worked (at least with JWT) in 5.1.

What I notice in the Laravel debug bar is when the query is issued to the users table it looks like this:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = 3

Note that the 3 (or whatever char appears) is actually the first in the UUID. So I wonder if there's some kind of cast going on there in core.

Another interesting nugget I found is if you store the column of any table as binary (to save space) , and then try to output the id like this in a blade:

{{ $model->id }}

It actually prints as 0 no matter what you do. The same is not true of the string type.

It's just one of those funny things. Laravel wasn't designed with UUIDs in mind and certainly not binary columns. I like to be a pain in the ass and push frameworks to their limit. Ha!

Thanks again.

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