In a new post to his site Matt Stauffer looks at a feature of the upcoming version 5 of the Laravel framework, middleware, and how it will replace the current Filter handling. This is part nine in a series about the new features coming in Laravel (the rest are linked at the top of the article).

If you've been following along with my previous blog posts about Laravel 5.0, you may have noticed that route filters were first moved to be their own directory and class structure, and then eventually they mysteriously disappeared. You may have even noticed that references to Middleware showed up in their place.

He starts off by defining what "middleware" actually is and how it fits into the overall execution flow of the application. He describes it as "a series of wrappers around your application that decorate the requests and the responses in a way that isn't a part of your application logic." He then gets into the code examples, showing how to write a simple Laravel-friendly middleware that blocks odd port requests to the application. He includes the configuration updates to integrate it, how to control where it runs and using before and after "filters" inside the middleware.