How to deal with private images in laravel 5?

Question

I am new to Laravel and trying to store private images so that only authenticated users can access them. Firstly I stored images in Public/UserImages folder. But here all th

Answer 1

Following is how I solved the problem of storing images in Laravel 5 such that only authenticated users can view the images. People who are not authenticated will be directed to a login page. My server is a Ubuntu/Apache2 server.

1. Create the directory /var/www/YOURWEBSITE/app/Assets/Images

2. Add route to app/Http/routes.php.

   Route::get('/images/{file}','ImageController@getImage');

3. Create a controller app/Http/Controllers/ImageController.php

   middleware('auth');
      } 
       public function getImage($filename) {
          $path = '/var/www/YOURWEBSITE/app/Assets/Images/'.$filename;
          $type = "image/jpeg";
          header('Content-Type:'.$type);
          header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($path));
          readfile($path);
   
       }
   
    }
   

4. In your view you have img tags which have:

   src="{{ url('/images/test.jpg') }}"
   

This of course assumes test.jpg is a file in /var/www/YOURWEBSITE/app/Assets/Images/

You can of course add more logic such as not hardcoding the path of the images, etc. This is just a simple example to enforce authentication. Note the use of middleware('auth') in the controller constructor.