How to Save User’s Last Login Time and IP Address

Quick tip of the day. Default Laravel Auth comes with User table and model, but without logging capability, so we need to build it ourselves. Fortunately, it’s very easy, I will show you one method.

Let’s say that we want to save user’s last login time and IP address in the same users table.
So we start with database migration:

php artisan make:migration add_login_fields_to_users_table

Then we fill it with these fields:

class AddLoginFieldsToUsersTable extends Migration
{

    public function up()
    {
        Schema::table('users', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->datetime('last_login_at')->nullable();
            $table->string('last_login_ip')->nullable();
        });
    }

    // ...

Next, we need to add these fields as fillables in app/User.php model:

class User extends Authenticatable
{
    protected $fillable = [
        'email',
        'password',
        'name',
        'last_login_at',
        'last_login_ip',
    ];

    // ...

Finally, how do we fill them in? You need to know that there is authenticated() method in the AuthenticatesUsers trait. It’s called every time someone logs in.

/**
 * The user has been authenticated.
 *
 * @param  \Illuminate\Http\Request  $request
 * @param  mixed  $user
 * @return mixed
 */
protected function authenticated(Request $request, $user)
{
    //
}

In trait this method is empty. So we have freedom to override it in LoginController and add whatever code we need.

app/Http/Controllers/Auth/LoginController.php:

function authenticated(Request $request, $user)
{
    $user->update([
        'last_login_at' => Carbon::now()->toDateTimeString(),
        'last_login_ip' => $request->getClientIp()
    ]);
}

And, that’s it! Here’s what we have in users table after log in: