Laravel: Access the Logged-in User's ID in Your Master Pages

August 26, 2014

If you are searching for a way to access the current user's ID in you master pages, adding a view creator to your BaseController does the trick. This will make the variable $current_user available in all master pages contained in the views/layouts directory.

class BaseController extends Controller {
    protected function setupLayout() {
        View::creator('layouts.*', function($view) {
          $view->with('current_user', Auth::id());
        });
       if ( ! is_null($this->layout)) {
          $this->layout = View::make($this->layout);
       }
    }
}