Laravel 5 Middleware with angular routes

Question

I'm using Laravel 5 with AngularJS for a project, in a way so that Laravel is used as an API and the API routes are in Laravel, while the client side routes are in AngularJS (app.js).

Is it possible to use Laravel Middleware to protect AngularJS routes, so for example, I want it to use the RedirectIfAuthenticated Middleware on the angular login form page route so people can't go to that page if they are logged in, except normally as far as I know, the middleware is specified in the Laravel controller, which doesn't have logic for angular side routes - hence, the problem.

So the question is, can I use Middleware or do I have to make angular send a get request asking laravel if the user is logged in on every page? Wouldn't that be less secure?

Answer 1

What I ended up doing was making a client-side cookie on login in angular to keep track of whether the user is logged in or not for user experience purposes (hiding information, redirecting before the view is rendered), and using Laravel Middleware to protect API calls to make sure the user can't interact or get information from the API on the server and to keep it secure in case the user changes their cookie to lie about their login status.

Alternatively, you could also send a request to the server before each page loads instead of the cookie check, but that adds quite a bit more overhead, and isn't any more secure - as far as I know, since that API call to check if the user is logged in is just for UX purposes too and the javascript for that can be removed by a malicious user.