In Laravel, there are many ways to check whether a user is logged in. In this post, I will demonstrate my favorite methods for performing these checks. A lot of people use auth()->user(), but Laravel offers us other methods to avoid using negation.

Checking if the User is Logged In

Although some people might tend to use auth()->user(), I prefer check as it returns a boolean.

<?php

if (auth()->check()) {
    // The user is logged in
}

// You can also use the following, which does the same thing as `check`
if (auth()->hasUser()) {
    // The user is logged in
}

Checking if the User is Not Logged In

I prefer this over using !auth()->check() or auth()->user() === null because guest clearly indicates that the user is not recognized by the system.

<?php

if (auth()->guest()) {
    // The user is not logged in
}

I try to limit my use of auth()->user() to situations where I need the current user to ensure my code is as clean as possible and easy to understand by avoiding negation in my conditionals.

My posts are short for now. I am trying to get used to writing and hope to be able to write longer content in the future, but I hope it is still useful to you. 🙂