I need to implement a "last seen" timestamp in laravel, so if your authenticated, and make a request to the application, we have an indicator of when you were last online. The most obvious approach is to have a snippet of code which sets a "last_access" column with the current time on the auth'd user, however i'm not 100% sure where the best place to put such an update in the execution tree of the application.

Note: I'm not too fussed about the extra database call, i'll actually be caching the timestamps to redis.

I have a couple of ideas on where to implement it but i'm looking for some validation on the ideas, from the more experienced laravel devs.

1. My first thought was to implement a middleware. I know rate limiting is a suggested use for middlewares, but i'm not sure if it's a good use case of them for "last online". I also don't know yet if the Authentication stuff has even run at that point, but i'm assuming the hardcoded SessionMiddleware runs before any custom ones.

2. I could implement it as an App::filter, but that seem's a bit hacky, since i'm not really filtering

3. I have a route prefix of "v1" which i could attach the update too via filters, but this seems even more hacky

4. My last idea is theorhetical in that i don't know if the events exist. But if there is some sort of event that is fired such as "authed" i could hook into that using an event subscriber. Or if there's not an "event" as such, if there's some sort of post auth method caller (i.e. push functions onto a stack "somewhere" that is iterated after a successful auth).

So far, i'm pretty sure, 3 is just a plain bad idea, 2 would be the quickest to "jsut get it done" but probably isn't a good use case of filters.

4 seems like it could be the correct method, since im more concerned about the auth/session more so than the request itself (which is what i perceive middlewares to be concerned with)

1 seems like a viable fallback if 4 is not possible due to laravel not having any usable post-auth hooks (need to look more in-depth at source, but couldn't find any so far).

Anyone have any advice/suggestions on this?