How to remove the registration feature in Laravel authentication

Written by Paweł Mysior on 18.08.2017

Laravel comes with authentication out of the box. When you create a new application, the controllers for registration, authentication and resetting passwords are already there. You can then create routes and views for all the authentication features by running an artisan command: php artisan make:auth.

Lets say you want to use the default authentication feature of Laravel, but you don't want the registration feature. It's an easy thing to do, you only need to make a few modifications:

1. Remove the register links

Before we do anything else, lets remove the register links from our views.

Remove this line from resources/views/welcome.blade.php:

<a href="{{ route('register') }}">Register</a>

and remove this line from resources/views/layouts/app.blade.php:

<li><a href="{{ route('register') }}">Register</a></li>

2. Remove the register view

Remove the resources/views/auth/register.blade.php file.

3. Remove the register controller

Remove the app/Http/Controllers/Auth/RegisterController.php file.

4. Remove the register routes

This is the most complicated step. By default, the php artisan make:auth command puts this Auth::routes() in our routes/web.php file. If you dig into the framework code, you'll find that this line actually calls the auth() method of Illuminate/Routing/Router. It looks like this:

/**
 * Register the typical authentication routes for an application.
 *
 * @return void
 */
public function auth()
{
    // Authentication Routes...
    $this->get('login', 'Auth\LoginController@showLoginForm')->name('login');
    $this->post('login', 'Auth\LoginController@login');
    $this->post('logout', 'Auth\LoginController@logout')->name('logout');
    
    // Registration Routes...
    $this->get('register', 'Auth\RegisterController@showRegistrationForm')->name('register');
    $this->post('register', 'Auth\RegisterController@register');
    
    // Password Reset Routes...
    $this->get('password/reset', 'Auth\ForgotPasswordController@showLinkRequestForm')->name('password.request');
    $this->post('password/email', 'Auth\ForgotPasswordController@sendResetLinkEmail')->name('password.email');
    $this->get('password/reset/{token}', 'Auth\ResetPasswordController@showResetForm')->name('password.reset');
    $this->post('password/reset', 'Auth\ResetPasswordController@reset');
}

So we can just pick the routes that we need. Lets replace the Auth::routes() line in our routes/web.php file with this:

// Authentication Routes...
$this->get('login', 'Auth\LoginController@showLoginForm')->name('login');
$this->post('login', 'Auth\LoginController@login');
$this->post('logout', 'Auth\LoginController@logout')->name('logout');

// Password Reset Routes...
$this->get('password/reset', 'Auth\ForgotPasswordController@showLinkRequestForm')->name('password.request');
$this->post('password/email', 'Auth\ForgotPasswordController@sendResetLinkEmail')->name('password.email');
$this->get('password/reset/{token}', 'Auth\ResetPasswordController@showResetForm')->name('password.reset');
$this->post('password/reset', 'Auth\ResetPasswordController@reset');

And that's it!