Jeff Ochoa

Laravel’s abort() helper explained

Jeff Ochoa

According to the official documentation:

The abort function throws an HTTP exception which will be rendered by the exception handler: abort(403). View more

What the documentation doesn’t say is that you can also pass either a Illuminate\Contracts\Support\Responsable::class or a \Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response::class instance, as a parameter to the abort() helper.

So, you could return a JSON response if you want:

<?php
abort(
response()->json(['message' => 'Ooops!.'], 402)
);
view raw 1.php hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The example above will return a 402 response with the following content:

{
"message": "Ooops!."
}
view raw 2.json hosted with ❤ by GitHub

An Illuminate\Http\Exceptions\HttpResponseException::class is thrown by the abort() method, and captured by the Illuminate\Foundation\Exceptions::class

<?php
class Handler implements ExceptionHandlerContract
{
//...
public function render($request, Exception $e)
{
if (method_exists($e, 'render') && $response = $e->render($request)) {
return Router::toResponse($request, $response);
} elseif ($e instanceof Responsable) {
return $e->toResponse($request);
}
$e = $this->prepareException($e);
if ($e instanceof HttpResponseException) {
return $e->getResponse();
} elseif ($e instanceof AuthenticationException) {
return $this->unauthenticated($request, $e);
} elseif ($e instanceof ValidationException) {
return $this->convertValidationExceptionToResponse($e, $request);
}
return $request->expectsJson()
? $this->prepareJsonResponse($request, $e)
: $this->prepareResponse($request, $e);
}
}
view raw 3.php hosted with ❤ by GitHub

As you can see in both cases, if ($e instanceof Responsable) or if ($e instanceof HttpResponseException), the render() function will just resolve the response that was passed as the first argument to the abort() helper.

This is the source code for the abort() helper:

<?php
if (! function_exists('abort')) {
/**
* Throw an HttpException with the given data.
*
* @param \Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response|\Illuminate\Contracts\Support\Responsable|int $code
* @param string $message
* @param array $headers
* @return void
*
* @throws \Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Exception\HttpException
* @throws \Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Exception\NotFoundHttpException
*/
function abort($code, $message = '', array $headers = [])
{
if ($code instanceof Response) {
throw new HttpResponseException($code);
} elseif ($code instanceof Responsable) {
throw new HttpResponseException($code->toResponse(request()));
}
app()->abort($code, $message, $headers);
}
}
view raw 4.php hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Wrapping up

Using the abort() method is a clean and nice way to return an early response from anywhere in your application if needed, such as a static view, an error, a JSON response, and so on.

Jeff Ochoa

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