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Livewire Navigation

Know which page the user is on, and which page they came from — inside Livewire requests, per browser tab.

The problem

A browser shows a page. A Livewire component on that page sends requests to Livewire's own endpoint. While handling those requests, Laravel describes the endpoint, not the page:

There are three different URLs involved:

• Browser URL — what the address bar shows, including query string changes made by #[Url] after the page loaded.
• Request URL — the URL of the request being handled.
• Livewire request URL — Livewire's update endpoint, the request URL of every component interaction.

Livewire remembers the path of the page a component was rendered on (Livewire::originalPath()), but not its query string, its route, or the page before it. This package fills exactly that gap.

Installation

That is all. The service provider is auto-discovered and appends the TrackNavigation middleware to the web middleware group. There is no configuration file.

If your pages use a middleware group other than web, add the middleware to it yourself, after StartSession:

Requires PHP 8.4+, Laravel 12 or 13, and Livewire 3.6+ or 4.

Usage

Every method returns null when the value is unknown and accepts a fallback:

Prefer dependency injection? Type-hint the service instead:

The methods give the same answers during the page request, during every Livewire update from that page, and during other requests sent from it such as a form POST.

Current page

The page the browser tab is displaying. During a Livewire update the URL includes query string changes made after the page loaded (for example by #[Url] properties), so redirecting to Navigation::currentUrl() keeps the user's filters.

currentRoute() returns the route name, or null for an unnamed route.

Previous page

The page the browser tab displayed before the current one.

• Reloading a page, or being redirected back to it after a failed validation, does not change its previous page.
• A redirect is never a page: after /old redirects to /new, the previous page of /new is the page before /old.
• JSON responses, downloads, error pages, AJAX and prefetch requests are never pages.
• The previous URL is always a URL of your own application, so it is safe to redirect to.

How it works

1. When a page renders, the previous page is taken from the browser's same-origin Referer header (which is per tab), falling back to the last page recorded in the session.
2. The current and previous page are embedded in the memo of every Livewire component on that page. The memo is signed by Livewire's snapshot checksum, so it cannot be tampered with, and it belongs to that tab.
3. During Livewire updates, the values are read back from the memo of the component being updated. Components rendered during an update inherit them.
4. After a page response (a successful text/html response to a GET), the middleware stores the page in the session, which serves requests that carry no component, such as a plain form POST.

wire:navigate

wire:navigate loads pages with a normal GET, so they are recorded like any other page. Pages restored from wire:navigate's history cache when using back/forward keep the context their components were rendered with.

Limitations

• Hover prefetching. wire:navigate.hover requests pages that may never be shown; the server cannot tell them apart from real visits. Components on pages that are shown still carry correct context; only the session fallback can be affected.
• Persisted components. A component kept alive with @persist reports the page it was first rendered on.
• Fragments (#section) never reach the server and are never included.
• Referrer policy. With Referrer-Policy: no-referrer the previous page falls back to the session, which is shared by all tabs. With a policy that sends only the origin, the previous page of a page request is reported as your application's root URL.
• Components rendered before installation fall back to the session until the page is reloaded.
• The previous URL is embedded in page HTML. Do not put secrets in URLs.

Testing your application

Drive real requests, and send a Referer header where the browser would:

Livewire::test() does not perform a page request, so inside it the values come from the session.

Documentation

• Architecture — classes, data flow and design decisions
• Edge cases and security — expected behaviour for every case
• Livewire internals — what Livewire tracks about the page
• Laravel request lifecycle — why Laravel's helpers change meaning
• Testing — how the test suite simulates the browser
• Non-goals — what the package deliberately leaves out

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md.

Development

License

The MIT License. See LICENSE.md.