Following the Laravel basic login: please explain a listener

Question

I was trying to follow basic auth for laravel and get how it generally works but am stuck in one area:

• call basic login: https://github.com/illuminate/auth/blob/master/Guard.php#L283
• attempt basic login: https://github.com/illuminate/auth/blob/master/Guard.php#L316
• attempt to login users with given credentials: https://github.com/illuminate/auth/blob/master/Guard.php#L355
• fire attempt: https://github.com/illuminate/auth/blob/master/Guard.php#L394
• the $this->events variable is a object that follows the dispatcher interface. Here's the fire method signature + description: https://github.com/illuminate/contracts/blob/master/Events/Dispatcher.php#L40

My question is with the last part: "Fire an event and call the listeners"

So I get that the event is authentication. What listeners are you calling in this context / what are they / what do they do?

Answer 1

You can find a good example on documentation of Laravel 4.2: http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/events (see section Basic Usage -> Subscribing To An Event). In this case you can do something after user do the auth. As you see in an example it's a smart way to update last login date.