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Preventing spam submitted through forms

This is a fork of spatie/laravel-honeypot that can be used with Laravel 6 (LTS) after being upgraded to PHP8. The upstream package only retains support for PHP7 with Laravel 6.

When adding a form to a public site, there's a risk that spam bots will try to submit it with fake values. Luckily, the majority of these bots are pretty dumb. You can thwart most of them by adding an invisible field to your form that should never contain a value when submitted. Such a field is called a honeypot. These spam bots will just fill all fields, including the honeypot.

When a submission comes in with a filled honeypot field, this package will discard that request. On top of that this package also checks how long it took to submit the form. This is done using a timestamp in another invisible field. If the form was submitted in a ridiculously short time, the anti spam will also be triggered.

After installing this package, all you need to do is to add a @honeypot Blade directive to your form.

Video tutorial

In this video, which is part of the Mailcoach video course, you can see how the package can be installed and used.

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Installation

You can install the package via composer:

Optionally, you can publish the config file of the package.

This is the content of the config file that will be published at config/honeypot.php:

Usage

First, you must add the @honeypot blade directive to any form you wish to protect.

@honeypot will add two fields: my_name and my_time (you can change the names in the config file).

Next, you must use the Spatie\Honeypot\ProtectAgainstSpam middleware in the route that handles the form submission. This middleware will intercept any request that submits a non empty value for the key named my_name. It will also intercept the request if it is submitted faster than the encrypted timestamp that the package generated in my_time.

If you want to integrate the Spatie\Honeypot\ProtectAgainstSpam middleware with Laravel's built in authentication routes, wrap the Auth::routes(); declaration with the appropriate middleware group (make sure to add the @honeypot directive to the authentication forms).

If your app has a lot of forms handled by many different controllers, you could opt to register it as global middleware.

Disabling in testing

By default, any protected form that is submitted in faster than 1 second will be marked as spammy. When running end to end tests, which should run as fast as possible, you probably don't want this.

To disable all honeypots in code, you can set the enabled config value to false.

Customizing the response

When a spammy submission is detected, the package will show a blank page by default. You can customize this behaviour by writing your own SpamResponse and specifying its fully qualified class name in the respond_to_spam_with key of the honeypot config file.

A valid SpamResponse is any class that implements the Spatie\Honeypot\SpamResponder\SpamResponder interface. This is what that interface looks like:

Even though a spam responder's primary purpose is to respond to spammy requests, you could do other stuff there as well. You could for instance use the properties on $request to determine the source of the spam (maybe all requests come from the same IP) and put some logic to block that source altogether.

If the package wrongly determined that the request is spammy, you can generate the default response by passing the $request to the $next closure, like you would in a middleware.

Customizing the generated honeypot fields

To customize output generated by @honeypot, you can publish the honeypot view with:

The view will be placed in resources/views/vendor/honeypot/honeypotFormFields.blade.php. This is the default content:

Events fired

Whenever spam is detected, the Spatie\Honeypot\SpamDetected event is fired. It has the $request as a public property.

Testing

Changelog

Please see CHANGELOG for more information on what has changed recently.

Alternatives

If you need stronger spam protection, consider using Google ReCaptcha or Akismet.

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING for details.

Security

If you discover any security related issues, please email [email protected] instead of using the issue tracker.

Credits

• Freek Van der Herten
• All Contributors

This package was inspired by the Honeypot package by Maksim Surguy.

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.