Comprehensive Laravel Form Validation: unique Rule, confirmed Password, and Secure Password Update

Laravel Unique Validation

Form validation is an essential part of Laravel development. One common requirement is to ensure a field’s value is unique within a database table. Laravel offers the unique validation rule to easily achieve this.

Basic Usage of unique Rule

To validate the uniqueness of a field, simply add the unique rule in the validation logic, for example:

$request->validate([
   'email' => 'unique:users',
]);

This checks whether the email value already exists in the users table, and returns a validation error if it does.

Excluding the Current Record

When updating user information, you may want to allow the user to keep their original email address. You can exclude the current record’s ID from the uniqueness check like this:

$request->validate([
   'email' => 'unique:users,email,' . $user->id,
]);

This validation ignores the record with $user->id and checks uniqueness only among other records.

Laravel confirmed Password Validation

When users register or change their password, it’s common to require entering the password twice to confirm. Laravel provides the confirmed rule to simplify this process.

How to Use confirmed Rule

Simply add confirmed to the field’s validation rules, for example:

$request->validate([
   'password' => 'required|confirmed',
]);

This rule automatically checks if password matches password_confirmation, and triggers a validation error if they don’t match.

Password Update Validation in Laravel

When implementing password update functionality, besides validating the new password, you need to verify the user’s old password and impose security requirements on the new password.

Common Validation Rules for Password Update

An example of a robust password update validation looks like this:

$request->validate([
   'old_password' => 'required',
   'new_password' => 'required|min:8|different:old_password',
   'confirm_password' => 'required|same:new_password',
]);

Where:

• old_password: Checks that the user inputs their current password.
• new_password: Requires the new password to be at least 8 characters and different from the old password.
• confirm_password: Ensures the confirmation matches the new password.

These rules help improve the security of the password update process and reduce user errors.