Routes resolve differently when cached

In yesterday's tip, I made an offhand remark about Laravel code behaving differently whether route caching is enabled or not. Maybe you were wondering if I had a specific example?

Consider the following route definitions:

Route::redirect('users', route('some-alternate-user-listing'));
Route::resource('users', UserController::class)->only(['create', 'store']);

The intention is that the first route definition would redirect a GET request for /users to some alternate route. But then we want the normal resource controller in place for creating and storing users.

There is a bug though, since redirect answers to all HTTP verbs, including POST. So we've now created an overlap in POST /users where it's defined both as a redirect and as an action on the UserController.

Which one wins? Here's where it gets tricky.

Without route caching, the last matching route definition wins. So my tests for creating a user hit my UserController as expected.

But with route caching enabled, the first matching definition wins instead! So if we ship this to production, even though tests are passing, any attempts to create a user will hit our redirect route instead.

Here to help,

Joel

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