Q:

postLogin displaying token and doesn't seem to be called in Laravel 5.2

I've been trying to wrap my head around this one for a while now, but can't seem to figure out what the problem is.  I've manually created a login page in Laravel 5.2.*, which I've done successfully in the past but for some reason this time it's not working...  Here is a breakdown of the important parts of my code:
Route::group(['middleware' => ['web']], function () {
    // Authentication Routes...
    Route::get('auth/login', 'Auth\AuthController@getLogin');
    Route::post('auth/login', 'Auth\AuthController@postLogin');
    Route::get('auth/logout', 'Auth\AuthController@getLogout');
    ....
});

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <meta name="csrf-token" content="{{ csrf_token() }}" />
        ....
    </head>
    <body>
        <form action="{{ url( '/auth/login' ) }}" class="clearfix" id="login" method="post" novalidate>
            {!! csrf_field() !!}

            @if (count($errors) > 0)
                <div class="show validation-summary">
                    <strong>Whoops!</strong> There were some problems with your input.<br />
                    <ul>
                        @foreach ($errors->all() as $error)
                            <li>{{ $error }}</li>
                        @endforeach
                    </ul>
                </div>
            @else
                <div class="validation-summary">
                    <ul>
                    </ul>
                </div>
            @endif

            <label class="grey" for="email"><b>Username: </b></label>
            <input class="field" type="text" name="email" id="email" value="{{ old('email') }}" size="23" />
            <label class="grey" for="password"><b>Password:</b></label>
            <input class="field" type="password" name="password" id="password" size="23" />
            <button class="bt_login" name="submit" type="submit">
                <i class="fa fa-btn fa-sign-in"></i> Login
            </button>
        </form>
        ....
    </body>
</html>

Here is the postLogin method from the AuthenticatesUsers trait:
public function postLogin(Request $request)
{
    return $this->login($request);
}

public function login(Request $request)
{
    $this->validate($request, [
        $this->loginUsername() => 'required', 'password' => 'required',
    ]);

    // If the class is using the ThrottlesLogins trait, we can automatically throttle
    // the login attempts for this application. We'll key this by the username and
    // the IP address of the client making these requests into this application.
    $throttles = $this->isUsingThrottlesLoginsTrait();

    if ($throttles && $this->hasTooManyLoginAttempts($request)) {
        return $this->sendLockoutResponse($request);
    }

    $credentials = $this->getCredentials($request);

    if (Auth::guard($this->getGuard())->attempt($credentials, $request->has('remember'))) {
        return $this->handleUserWasAuthenticated($request, $throttles);
    }

    // If the login attempt was unsuccessful we will increment the number of attempts
    // to login and redirect the user back to the login form. Of course, when this
    // user surpasses their maximum number of attempts they will get locked out.
    if ($throttles) {
        $this->incrementLoginAttempts($request);
    }

    return $this->sendFailedLoginResponse($request);
}

When clicking on the login button it seems to display the csrf token value and doesn't even hit the postLogin method in the AuthenticatesUsers trait.  If you want a live example you can go to http://www.dorothea.co.za/auth/login and click on the Log In sliding panel at the top of the screen, and then click login.

A:

Just to answer my question above, the problem was in the tokensMatch method of the app/Http/Middleware/VerifyCsrfToken.php class.  Here is the code that was causing the issue:
echo($request->header('X-CSRF-Token') .' '. $request->input('_token'));
die();

I don't think I made any changes to this file so just be aware if you're using authentication and your version of laravel is 5.2.7.

