How to modify Laravel middleware using Jessengers/Agent package to allow cURL access?

Question

I am using the Jessengers/Agent package in my Laravel project for user agent parsing, and I have a middleware (BotMiddleware) that currently denies access to bots. However, I want to modify it to allow access for cURL requests. The middleware checks if the request comes from a bot using the Jessengers/Agent package. How can I adjust the middleware to specifically allow cURL requests?

Here is my existing middleware code:

public function handle(Request $request, Closure $next)
    {
        $agent = new Agent();

        // Check if the request comes from a bot
        if ($agent->isRobot()) {
            return response('Bot detected, access denied', 403);
        }

        return $next($request);
    }

I've attempted to modify the middleware, but I'm not sure how to correctly identify cURL requests based on the User-Agent header. Any help or suggestions on how to achieve this would be greatly appreciated.

I also tried this but didn't work out:

class BotMiddleware
{
    /**
     * Handle an incoming request.
     *
     * @param  \Illuminate\Http\Request  $request
     * @param  \Closure(\Illuminate\Http\Request): (\Illuminate\Http\Response|\Illuminate\Http\RedirectResponse)  $next
     * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response|\Illuminate\Http\RedirectResponse
     */
    public function handle(Request $request, Closure $next)
    {
        $agent = new Agent();

        // Check if the request comes from cURL
        if ($this->isCurlRequest($request)) {
            return $next($request);
        }

        // Check if the request comes from a bot
        if ($agent->isRobot()) {
            return response('Bot detected, access denied', 403);
        }

        return $next($request);
    }

    /**
     * Check if the request comes from cURL.
     *
     * @param \Illuminate\Http\Request $request
     * @return bool
     */
    private function isCurlRequest(Request $request)
    {
        return $request->header('User-Agent') === 'curl';
        // Adjust the condition based on the actual User-Agent header value of your cURL requests.
    }
}

Answer 1

based on docs https://laravel.com/docs/10.x/requests#request-headers you can check if the request contains a given header and its value :

dd($request->hasHeader('User-Agent'), $request->header('User-Agent');

now you can update isCurlRequest like this

private function isCurlRequest(Request $request)
{
    return  $request->hasHeader('User-Agent') && $request->header('User-Agent') == 'curl';
}