Preventing Duplicate Requests in Laravel: The AtomicLockMiddleware

How to Handle Multiple Request Collisions and Keep Your Laravel App Running Smoothly

If you ever developed a web app in Laravel, you must have faced one such problem which is rather common: handling of duplicate requests currently being processed. It’s that trivial problem, but it may lead to data inconsistency, a failed transaction, or-what’s worse-a poor user experience. Imagine your application handling some form submission twice. You’d end up with duplicate records or maybe even duplicated payments, which would be a huge headache both for you and your users.

For this, we need to ensure each request should be processed one at a time, especially when the action is sensitive, such as making any payment or updating something. One of the solutions is by using an atomic lock. In this post, I am going to walk you through how I implemented a simple a middleware in Laravel to handle such scenarios. This middleware will allow processing of only one request from any particular user at one time for specific actions.

Let’s take a closer look into how it works and why you might want to use it in your projects.

Why Should You Care About Duplicate Requests?

Before getting into the code, let’s talk about why handling duplicate requests is important. It’s easy to think of a web request as a one-time thing, but there are several scenarios where duplicate requests can sneak in, like:

• Slow internet connections: Users might click the same button multiple times out of impatience.
• Page reloads: If a user refreshes the page quickly after submitting a form, it might send the same request again.
• Automated scripts or bots: These can sometimes trigger requests in a way you don’t expect.

In these cases, Laravel could end up processing two (or more) identical requests at the same time. That’s where the atomic lock middleware comes in.

The Middleware

The middleware is simple and its ensures only one request from a user is processed at a time. It works by locking the request URL with a unique…