Laravel - Using (:any?) wildcard for ALL routes?

Question 1

Edit: There has been some confusion since the release of Laravel 4 regarding this topic, this answer was targeting Laravel 3.

There are a few ways to approach this.

The first method is matching (:any)/(:all?):

Route::any('(:any)/(:all?)', function($first, $rest=''){
    $page = $rest ? "{$first}/{$rest}" : $first;
    dd($page);
});

Not the best solution because it gets broken into multiple parameters, and for some reason (:all) doesn't work by itself (bug?)

The second solution is to use a regular expression, this is a better way then above in my opinion.

Route::any( '(.*)', function( $page ){
    dd($page);
});

There is one more method, which would let you check if there are cms pages even when the route may have matched other patterns, provided those routes returned a 404. This method modifies the event listener defined in routes.php:

Event::listen('404', function() {
    $page = URI::current();
    // custom logic, else
    return Response::error('404');
});

However, my preferred method is #2. I hope this helps. Whatever you do, make sure you define all your other routes above these catch all routes, any routes defined after will never trigger.

Question 2

Laravel 5

This solution works fine on Laravel 5:

Route::get('/admin', function () {

  // url /admin

});

Route::get('/{any}', function ($any) {

  // any other url, subfolders also

})->where('any', '.*');

Lumen 5

This is for Lumen instead:

$app->get('/admin', function () use ($app) {
  //
});

$app->get('/{any:.*}', function ($any) use ($app) {
  //
});

Question 3

Hitting a 404 status seems a bit wrong to me. This can get you in all kind of problems when logging the 404's. I recently bumped into the same wildcard routing problem in Laravel 4 and solved it with the following snippet:

Route::any('{slug}', function($slug)
{
    //do whatever you want with the slug
})->where('slug', '([A-z\d-\/_.]+)?');

This should solve your problem in a controlled way. The regular expression can be simplified to:

'(.*)?'

But you should use this at your own risk.

Edit (addition):

As this overwrites a lot of routes, you should consider wrapping it in an "App::before" statement:

    App::before(function($request) {
            //put your routes here
    });

This way, it will not overwrite custom routes you define later on.

Question 4

Route::get("{path}", "SomeController@serve")->where('path', '.+');

The above code will capture the recursive sub urls you mentioned:

/
/something
/something/something
/something/something/something
/something/something/something/something

Any other special cases, such as admin/*, you can capture before this one.

Question 5

Just spelling-out my experience in case it helps someone piece something together.

I built a self-API-consuming React app on Laravel. It has a single view served by Laravel/Lumen. It uses the React router. Clicking links in the app always worked, but typing-in URLs needed the following consideration:

In Laravel I used the following in my web.php routes file:

Route::view('/{path?}', 'app')
    ->where('path', '.*')
    ->name('react');

And everything worked.

Then I switched the project to Lumen. Thanks to this post, I used the following in my web.php routes file:

$router->get('/{all:.*}', function() {
    return view('app');
});

This worked for first level URLS such as:

/
/something

However,

/something/something etc.

did not.

I looked in the network tab in Google Developer tools and noticed that the URL for app.js was appending /something in front of app.js on second and higher tier URLS, such as:

myapp.com/something
app.js URL:  myapp.com/js/app.js  (as it should be)

myapp.com/something/something
app.js URL:  myapp.com/something/js/app.js  (not found)

All I had to do was add a leading slash to my app.js source in my single view page such as:

<script src="/js/app.js" defer></script>

Instead of:

<script src="js/app.js" defer></script>

so:

This worked in Laravel (It was a Blade file that may have automatically resolved the js/app.js URL)

<script src="{{ asset('js/app.js') }}" defer></script>

with

Route::view('/{path?}', 'app')
    ->where('path', '.*')
    ->name('react');

But, I had to do this in Lumen (Not a Blade file):

<script src="/js/app.js" defer></script>

with

$router->get('/{all:.*}', function() {
    return view('app');
});

Question 6

Add this in the end of routes file

App::missing(function($exception)
{
    return View::make('notfound');
});

from http://scotch.io/tutorials/simple-and-easy-laravel-routing

Question 7

Thanks for the solution William. However methods 1 & 2 aren't working anymore Laravel 4, and in order to use solution #3 in Laravel 4 you will have to fire the 404 event in your start/global.php file.

App::error(function(Exception $exception, $code)
{
    // i.o. -> this is our catchall!
    // http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13297278/laravel-using-any-wildcard-for-all-routes
    Event::fire('404');

    return View::make('error')->with('exception', $exception)->with('code', $code);

    Log::error($exception);
});

Now we can handle this in our routes.php file:

Event::listen('404', function() {
    // url?
    $url = Request::path();

    // LOGIC HERE

    // else
    return View::make('error');
});

Question 8

Having basic lumen scaffolding. In my case, I have 2 frontend apps and api routes

<?php // routes/web.php
/** @var \Laravel\Lumen\Routing\Router $router */

$router->group([
    'prefix' => '/api/v1',
    'namespace' => 'App\Http\Controllers'
], function () use ($router) {

    require 'routes-group1.php';
    require 'routes-group2.php';
    // ...
});

$router->get('/admin{any:.*}', function () {
    return file_get_contents('../public/a/index.html');
});

$router->get('{any:.*}', function () {
    return file_get_contents('../public/m/index.html');
});

Question 9

Laravel 8 / redirect only under subdirectory

I wanted to redirect not all non-existing URLs, but only the ones in a specific subdirectory (like https://example.com/subdir/*)

If I just had wanted to redirect all missing URLs I could have just used the fallback route at the end of the web.php file:

Route::fallback(function () {
    //
});

But as I wanted to redirect only urls in subdirectories, I used this code, which worked for me (just redirecting to /):

Route::get('subdirectory/{any}', function($page){return redirect()->to('/');})->where('any', '.*');

I found this in the FallbackRouteTest.php.

Question 10

Fallback Routes Since Laravel 5.5

Using the Route::fallback method, you may define a route that will be executed when no other route matches the incoming request. Typically, unhandled requests will automatically render a "404" page via your application's exception handler. However, since you would typically define the fallback route within your routes/web.php file, all middleware in the web middleware group will apply to the route. You are free to add additional middleware to this route as needed:

Route::fallback(function () {
    //
});

Note: The fallback route should always be the last route registered by your application.