Dealing with request validation and error messages

The Laravel framework offers us many ways to show error messages, and, by default, Laravel's base controller class uses a ValidatesRequests trait that provides methods to validate the incoming HTTP request, including many default rules such as required, email format, date format, string, and much more.

Note

You can read more about the possible validation rules at https://laravel.com/docs/5.6/validation#available-validation-rules.

It is pretty simple to use request validation, as we can see in the following code block:

$validatedData = $request->validate([
'field name' => 'validation rule, can be more than one',
'field name' => 'validation rule',
'field name' => 'validation rule',
...
]);

For example, let's see how we can validate the incoming request to the bikes endpoint using the HTTP POST method to localhost:8081/api/bikes.

The validation code will look as follows:

$validatedData = $request->validate([
'make' => 'required'...