☕ Caffeine for Laravel

🗂️ Table of Contents

• 📖 Summary
• 📦 Installation
• ⚙️ Configuration
• 🚀 Usage
• ⚠️ Considerations
• ⬆️ Upgrading
• 🤝 Contributing
• 🔐 Security

📖 Summary

Prevent forms from timing out when submitting them after leaving them on-screen for a considerable amount of time. Laravel defaults session lifetime to 120 minutes, but that is configurable and could be different site-by-site.

☕ Caffeine works by sending a "drip" — a lightweight AJAX request at regular intervals — to keep the session alive while a form is open. It only activates on pages with a _token field or a csrf-token meta tag, so all other pages time-out as normal.

🔒 Why This Approach?

This package keeps the integrity of your site's security by avoiding the following:

• 🚫 Exposing the CSRF Token on an unsecured endpoint.
• 🚫 Eliminating CSRF Token validation on specific routes, or altogether.
• 🚫 Removing session-timeout on all pages.

📋 Requirements

• PHP 8.2+
• Laravel 11, 12, or 13

📦 Installation

composer require genealabs/laravel-caffeine

✨ The service provider is auto-discovered. No additional setup is required.

⚙️ Configuration

Only publish the config file if you need to customize it:

php artisan caffeine:publish --config

This creates the following config file:

return [
    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Drip Interval
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | Here you may configure the interval with which Caffeine for Laravel
    | keeps the session alive. By default this is 5 minutes (expressed
    | in milliseconds). This needs to be shorter than your session
    | lifetime value configured set in "config/session.php".
    |
    | Default: 300000 (int)
    |
    */
    'drip-interval' => 300000,

    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Domain
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | You may optionally configure a separate domain that you are running
    | Caffeine for Laravel on. This may be of interest if you have a
    | monitoring service that queries other apps. Setting this to
    | null will use the domain of the current application.
    |
    | Default: null (null|string)
    |
    */
    'domain' => null,

    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Drip Endpoint URL
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | Sometimes you may wish to white-label your app and not expose the AJAX
    | request URLs as belonging to this package. To achieve that you can
    | rename the URL used for dripping caffeine into your application.
    |
    | Default: 'genealabs/laravel-caffeine/drip' (string)
    |
    */
    'route' => 'genealabs/laravel-caffeine/drip',

    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Checking for Lapsed Drips
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | If the browser tab is suspended due to inactivity or the device is put to
    | sleep, it will still cause an error when trying to submit the form. To
    | avoid this, we force-reload the form 2 minutes prior to session
    | time-out or later. Setting this setting to 0 will disable this
    | check if you don't want to use it.
    |
    | Default: 2000 (int)
    |
    */
    'outdated-drip-check-interval' => 2000,

    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Use Route Middleware
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | Drips are enabled via route middleware instead of global middleware.
    |
    | Default: false (bool)
    |
    */
    'use-route-middleware' => false,

];

🚀 Usage

That's it! It will apply itself automatically where it finds a form with a _token field, or a meta tag named "csrf-token", while pages are open in browsers. 🎉

🚫 Prevent Caffeination

There are two methods to prevent Caffeine from keeping the session alive:

🏷️ Meta Tag Method

Add the following meta tag to any page you want to exclude:

<meta name="caffeinated" content="false">

🛣️ Route Middleware Method

Publish the config file and set use-route-middleware to true. This disables the default global middleware mode. Then selectively enable Caffeine on specific routes or route groups:

Route::any('test', 'TestController@test')->middleware('caffeinated');

Route::middleware(['caffeinated'])->group(function () {
    Route::any('test', 'TestController@test');
});

📝 Note: This will only have effect if the page includes a form. If not, the page will not caffeinate your application anyway.

⚠️ Considerations

🔌 Livewire / Inertia / SPA

This package works by injecting JavaScript that pings a keep-alive endpoint. It is designed for traditional Blade forms. If you are using Livewire or Inertia, their built-in request cycles typically keep the session alive already, so this package is generally unnecessary in those contexts.

🚧 Incompatible Packages

• Voyager has been reported as being incompatible. To work around this, configure Caffeine to use route-based middleware on all non-Voyager routes.

🛤️ Routes

This package registers routes under genealabs/laravel-caffeine.

⬆️ Upgrading

0.6.0

This update changed the config file setting names. Delete the published config file config/genealabs-laravel-caffeine.php if it exists, and re-publish using the command in the Configuration section.

For all other version changes, see the Releases page on GitHub.

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! 🎉 Please review the Contribution Guidelines and observe the Code of Conduct before submitting a pull request.

🧪 Quality Checklist

• ✅ Achieve as close to 100% code coverage as possible using unit tests.
• ✅ Be fully PSR-1, PSR-4, and PSR-12 compliant.
• ✅ Provide an up-to-date CHANGELOG.md adhering to Keep a Changelog.
• ✅ Have no PHPMD or PHPCS warnings throughout all code.

🔐 Security

If you discover a security vulnerability, please report it via GitHub Security Advisories rather than opening a public issue.

Built with ❤️ for the Laravel community using lots of ☕ by Mike Bronner.

This is an MIT-licensed open-source project. Its continued development is made possible by the community. If you find it useful, please consider 💖 becoming a sponsor and ⭐ starring it on GitHub.