Show API exceptions in Laravel.

Check Request Headers

If you are using Postman (or similar) in order to make a request, you should add this headers

• Accept: Application/Json
• Content-Type: Application/Json

Then you should be able to see JSON response with the current exception

Showing Exceptions while running tests

Check that tests are using the proper json methods

// This method does not add headers to the request
// $response = $this->post('api/users');
// This method add headers to the request in order to get json exceptions
$response = $this->postJson('api/users');

Cleaning Exceptions Messages

If you are working with Laravel on an API there are helpers like

• abort
• abort_if
• abort_unless

In development, it would show an entire stack trace, and maybe you expect to get a preview of what exactly it throws, well you can go to .env file and change the value of

## APP_ENV='local' instead of this
APP_ENV='production'

This is great for production, but on development there are a lot of benefits to keep environment as local, in order to keep the messages cleaner we can make a change in app/exceptions/handler.php

public function register() 
{
    $this->renderable(function (Exception $exception, Request $request) {
        if($request->expectsJson()) {
            return response()->json([
                'message' => $exception->getMessage()
            ], $exception->getCode());
        }
    });
}

Now, you are able to still on development and get a cleaner response

Going One-Step Forward

You can create custom Exception classes to represent in a better way some logic exception

class CustomException extends Exception
{
    public static function internalException()
    {
        return new static('An internal Exception Ocurred!', 500);
    }
}
class TicketsException extends CustomException
{
    public static function noMoreTicketsAvailable()
    {
        return new static('No More Tickets Available', 404);
    }
}

Now in any place of your code you can throw a custom exception

throw TicketsException::noMoreTicketsAvailable();

And it should show your custom message with the custom status code

Testing Custom Exceptions

public function some_test()
{
    $this->withoutExceptionHandling();
    
    $this->assertExpectExceptionObject(
        TicketsException::noMoreTicketsAvailable()
    );
    
    // ...
    
    $response $this->postJson('api/tickets/purchase');
}

Take in Mind

As now exceptions are custom objects you are able to add as many methods as it is required to add more details or constants / enums to handle exception statuses

So just to keep it simple we are going to use Symfony Http Response, but it could grow to a backed enum if it is required

class TicketsException extends CustomException
{
    public static function noMoreTicketsAvailable()
    {
        return new static('No More Tickets Available', Response::NOT_FOUND);
    }
}

Thanks for reading!