Detect and change language on the fly with Laravel

If you’re builiding a multilingual site you may want to guess the user’s language in order to provide the correct content and still let her decide afterwards which language to use. So this a is two part problem:

Find a way to detect the user’s native language and tell Laravel to use it Provide a way for the user to change it and store that choice in session This tutorial will not cover how to make a multilingual Laravel application, for that I’ll suggest you take a look at Laravel Translatable and this tutorial on Laravel News.

Detect the user’s native language

There are multiple ways to detect language from a HTTP Request but as I only needed to check for english or french speakers, I choosed to check if those were present in the HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE HTTP directive and fallback to english if nothing matches.

The best way to do that is to use a Middleware. Type the following command from the console to create a new one: php artisan make:middleware SetLocale.

<?php

namespace App\Http\Middleware;

use Closure;
use Session;
use App;
use Config;

class SetLocale
{
    /**
     *
     * Handle an incoming request.
     *
     * @param  \Illuminate\Http\Request  $request
     * @param  \Closure  $next
     * @return mixed
     */
    public function handle($request, Closure $next)
    {
        if (Session::has('locale')) {
            $locale = Session::get('locale', Config::get('app.locale'));
        } else {
            $locale = substr($request->server('HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'), 0, 2);

            if ($locale != 'fr' && $locale != 'en') {
                $locale = 'en';
            }
        }

        App::setLocale($locale);

        return $next($request);
    }