In this episode, we dive into a common situation you'll eventually come across when building Inertia apps with Laravel—expired requests due to CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) token expiration. We start by explaining what CSRF tokens are and why they matter: they keep your forms secure by making sure the person who loads the form is also the one submitting it.
You'll see how this can cause issues if the user leaves a page open for a very long time—when they submit the form, they'll get a 419 Page Expired error. Together, we'll simulate this error by manually removing the CSRF token and trying to submit a form.
Next, we'll look at upgrading our error handler from the previous episode to catch this specific 419 error. Instead of showing a generic error page, we'll display a friendlier flash (toast) message, letting the user know their session has expired and they need to try again. You'll see how to customize the error message and style it as an error or warning toast.
By the end, you'll know how to gracefully handle these rare but inevitable expired Inertia requests, giving your users a better experience!