From time-to-time, you will happen upon a problem between your frontend and API that you can't quite see. A dd() in your controller or a console.log() in your frontend just doesn't seem to cut it and the problem seems out of reach. Luckily, Laravel provides you with a way to see the request as it hits your API, and that is through middleware.

First Steps:

• In your terminal, go to where your project's API is located, and type php artisan make:middleware LogRoute. This will create a file in app/Http/Middleware.
• If you haven't already, download Postman. It will help you to test your API without having to go through your frontend.

The Meat:

• In your LogRoute.php, import the Log Facade by typing use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Log at the top of your file.
• Next, in our handle() function, we'll need to first ensure that our request can pass unimpeded between handlers.

  public function handle(Request $request, Closure $next){
    $response = $next($request)
    ...
  }
  

• Next, we'll need to tell our Middleware to stop running if our app environment isn't local. We'll do that with an if statement: if (app()->environment('local')).

• Now we can finish up our middleware by making an array of our request and response and logging that data. Our response is what's most important, as it will have a stack trace to help us debug.

  public function handle(Request $request, Closure $next){
    $response = $next($request);
  
    if (app()->environment('local')){
        $data = [
            'request' => $request->all(),
            'response' => $response->getContent()
        ];
        Log::info(json_encode($data));
    }
  
    return $response;
  }
  

Finishing Up:

• To use our middleware, we first have to register it. Go to Kernel.php in your app/Http folder and scroll all the way down to $routeMiddleware. When you're there, add this line: 'log.route' => \App\Http\Middleware\LogRoute::class,.
• Now go to your API routes and place ->middleware('log.route') at the end of the route that you want to test.

The End:

• Test your API by making a request with Postman.
• Go to storage/logs/laravel.log to see what's happening.

One More Thing:

• You can add more methods in your middleware to test requests, such as $request->getMethod() which will tell you the type of request method that hit the API (POST, GET, etc.) and $request->getUri() which will tell you the source of the request.