Download the PHP package spatie/laravel-referer without Composer

Remember a visitor's original referer

Remember a visitor's original referer in session. The referer is (highest priority first):

• The utm_source query parameter
• The domain from the request's Referer header if there's an external host in the URL
• Empty

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Installation

You can install the package via composer:

The package will automatically register itself in Laravel 5.5. In Laravel 5.4. you'll manually need to register the Spatie\Referer\RefererServiceProvider service provider in config/app.php.

You can publish the config file with:

Publishing the config file is necessary if you want to change the key in which the referer is stored in the session or if you want to disable a referer source.

Usage

To capture the referer, all you need to do is add the Spatie\Referer\CaptureReferer middleware to your middleware stack. In most configuration's, you'll only want to capture the referer in "web" requests, so it makes sense to register it in the web stack. Make sure it comes after Laravel's StartSession middleware!

The easiest way to retrieve the referer is by just resolving it out of the container:

Or you could opt to use Laravel's automatic facades:

The captured referer is (from high to low priority):

• The utm_source query parameter, or:
• The domain from the request's Referer header if there's an external host in the URL, or:
• Empty

An empty referer will never overwrite an exisiting referer. So if a visitor comes from google.com and visits a few pages on your site, those pages won't affect the referer since local hosts are ignored.

Forgetting or manually setting the referer

The Referer class provides dedicated methods to forget, or manually set the referer.

Changing the way the referer is determined

The referer is determined by doing checks on various sources, which are defined in the configuration.

A source implements the Source interface, and requires one method, getReferer. If a source is able to determine a referer, other sources will be ignored. In other words, the sources array is ordered by priority.

In the next example, we'll add a source that can use a ?ref query parameter to determine the referer. Additionally, we'll ignore ?utm_source parameters.

First, create the source implementations:

Then register your source in the sources array. We'll also disable the utm_source while we're at it.

That's it! Source implementations can be this simple, or more advanced if necessary.

Changelog

Please see CHANGELOG for more information what has changed recently.

Testing

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING for details.

Security

If you've found a bug regarding security please mail [email protected] instead of using the issue tracker.

Credits

• Sebastian De Deyne
• All Contributors

License

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