Detect Facebook Crawler in middleware

Question

I have several pages in my laravel app that I need to share link in Facebook.

Thing is, when I share it, Facebook get the properties og:image from login page, as it is redirect by my middleware.

I saw here that I must detect Facebook User Agent and redirect to a public page that should only have the openGraph properties to render link in Facebook.

Is it the only way?

I will end up creating a middleware, with a switch inside, to manage all the differents publics pages I have, it is not so nice...

Any idean how should I do that???

Answer 1

I solved it creating my own Middleware : RedirectCrawlers

    <?php

namespace App\Http\Middleware;

use App\Tournament;
use Closure;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;

class RedirectCrawlers
{
    /**
     * Handle an incoming request.
     *
     * @param  \Illuminate\Http\Request $request
     * @param  \Closure $next
     * @return mixed
     */
    public function handle($request, Closure $next)
    {
        $crawlers = [
            'facebookexternalhit/1.1',
            'facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)',
            'Facebot',
            'Twitterbot',
        ];

        $userAgent = $request->header('User-Agent');

        if (str_contains($userAgent, $crawlers)) {
            switch (Route::getCurrentRoute()->getPath()) {
                case "tournaments/{tournament}/register":
                    $tournament = Tournament::where('slug', $request->tournament)->first();
                    return view('public/register', compact('tournament'));
            }
        }
        return $next($request);
    }
}

Then I created a resources/views/public/register.blade.php

<meta property="og:title" content="{{trans('core.competitors_register') }}"/>


<meta name="description" content="Registrate en el torneo {{ $tournament->name }}"/>
<meta property="og:description" content="Registrate en el torneo {{ $tournament->name }}"/>
<meta property="og:type" content="website"/>
<meta property="og:image" content="https://kendozone.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/home.jpg"/>
<meta property="og:image:secure_url" content="https://kendozone.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/home.jpg"/>
<meta property="og:url" content="{{$request->url()}}"/>
<meta property="fb:app_id" content="780774498699579"/>

<meta name=" twitter:title" content="{{trans('core.competitors_register')}}"/>
<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://kendozone.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/home.jpg"/>
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary"/>
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Registrate en el torneo {{ $tournament->name }}"/>

that is a public page, that just have info needed to share to Facebook.

Then in App\Http\Kernel.php I add the route inside $middlewareGroups in 'web', before Authenticate Middleware, so that it redirect it to the public page :

        \App\Http\Middleware\RedirectCrawlers::class,

Solution exists in stackOverflow, like commented, but none of them for Laravel 5.3!

Hope it helps!