Get the last login date of a user in Laravel

By default, in Laravel, the last_login_at field is not available in the users table. I personally needed this information to run some background tasks.

The approach I chose is to use the Login event provided by Laravel Fortify.

For that, just create a new listener that will update the last_logged_at field in the users table whenever a user logs in.

• The code
• Some notes

# The code

You can create a listener using the Artisan command:

php artisan make:listener UpdateUserLastLoggedAt --event=Illuminate\Auth\Events\Login

And then implement the listener as follows:

<?php
 
namespace App\Listeners; ...
 
use App\Models\User;
use Illuminate\Auth\Events\Login;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue;
use Illuminate\Queue\InteractsWithQueue; 
 
class UpdateUserLastLoggedAt implements ShouldQueue
{
    use InteractsWithQueue;
 
    public function __construct() {}
 
    public function handle(Login $event): void
    {
        /** @var User $user */
        $user = $event->user;
 
        $user->update([
            'last_logged_at' => now(),
        ]);
    }
}

By default, Laravel will automatically find and register your event listeners by scanning your application's Listeners directory. When Laravel finds any listener class method that begins with handle or __invoke, Laravel will register those methods as event listeners for the event that is type-hinted in the method's signature.

— https://laravel.com/docs/12.x/events#defining-listeners

Oh and don't forget to add the last_logged_at field to your users table migration:

php artisan make:migration add_last_logged_at_to_users_table

Then, in the migration file, you can add the new column:

Schema::table('users', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->timestamp('last_logged_at')->nullable();
});

And run the migration:

php artisan migrate

# Some notes

• The last_logged_at field is nullable, so it will be null for users who have never logged in.
• The UpdateUserLastLoggedAt listener implements the ShouldQueue interface, which means it will be queued for processing. This is preferable if you want to avoid slowing down the login process.
• This works with Breeze, Jetstream, and Sanctum as they all use the Illuminate\Auth\Events\Login event.
• If you wanna go further, the Login event also provides the following properties:
  • string $guard – The authentication guard name.
  • Authenticatable $user – The authenticated user.
  • bool $remember – Indicates if the user should be "remembered".