Laravel - Using (:any?) wildcard for ALL routes?

Laravel 5

This solution works fine on Laravel 5:

Route::get('/admin', function () {

  // url /admin

});

Route::get('/{any}', function ($any) {

  // any other url, subfolders also

})->where('any', '.*');

Lumen 5

This is for Lumen instead:

$app->get('/admin', function () use ($app) {
  //
});

$app->get('/{any:.*}', function ($any) use ($app) {
  //
});

Hitting a 404 status seems a bit wrong to me. This can get you in all kind of problems when logging the 404's. I recently bumped into the same wildcard routing problem in Laravel 4 and solved it with the following snippet:

Route::any('{slug}', function($slug)
{
    //do whatever you want with the slug
})->where('slug', '([A-z\d-\/_.]+)?');

This should solve your problem in a controlled way. The regular expression can be simplified to:

'(.*)?'

But you should use this at your own risk.

Edit (addition):

As this overwrites a lot of routes, you should consider wrapping it in an "App::before" statement:

    App::before(function($request) {
            //put your routes here
    });

This way, it will not overwrite custom routes you define later on.

Edit: There has been some confusion since the release of Laravel 4 regarding this topic, this answer was targeting Laravel 3.

There are a few ways to approach this.

The first method is matching (:any)/(:all?):

Route::any('(:any)/(:all?)', function($first, $rest=''){
    $page = $rest ? "{$first}/{$rest}" : $first;
    dd($page);
});

Not the best solution because it gets broken into multiple parameters, and for some reason (:all) doesn't work by itself (bug?)

The second solution is to use a regular expression, this is a better way then above in my opinion.

Route::any( '(.*)', function( $page ){
    dd($page);
});

There is one more method, which would let you check if there are cms pages even when the route may have matched other patterns, provided those routes returned a 404. This method modifies the event listener defined in routes.php:

Event::listen('404', function() {
    $page = URI::current();
    // custom logic, else
    return Response::error('404');
});

However, my preferred method is #2. I hope this helps. Whatever you do, make sure you define all your other routes above these catch all routes, any routes defined after will never trigger.

Route::get("{path}", "SomeController@serve")->where('path', '.+');

The above code will capture the recursive sub urls you mentioned:

/
/something
/something/something
/something/something/something
/something/something/something/something

Any other special cases, such as admin/*, you can capture before this one.

Just spelling-out my experience in case it helps someone piece something together.

I built a self-API-consuming React app on Laravel. It has a single view served by Laravel/Lumen. It uses the React router. Clicking links in the app always worked, but typing-in URLs needed the following consideration:

In Laravel I used the following in my web.php routes file:

Route::view('/{path?}', 'app')
    ->where('path', '.*')
    ->name('react');

And everything worked.

Then I switched the project to Lumen. Thanks to this post, I used the following in my web.php routes file:

$router->get('/{all:.*}', function() {
    return view('app');
});

This worked for first level URLS such as:

/
/something 

However,

/something/something etc.

did not.

I looked in the network tab in Google Developer tools and noticed that the URL for app.js was appending /something in front of app.js on second and higher tier URLS, such as:

myapp.com/something
app.js URL:  myapp.com/js/app.js  (as it should be)

myapp.com/something/something
app.js URL:  myapp.com/something/js/app.js  (not found)

All I had to do was add a leading slash to my app.js source in my single view page such as:

<script src="/js/app.js" defer></script>

Instead of:

<script src="js/app.js" defer></script>

so:

This worked in Laravel (It was a Blade file that may have automatically resolved the js/app.js URL)

<script src="{{ asset('js/app.js') }}" defer></script>

with

Route::view('/{path?}', 'app')
    ->where('path', '.*')
    ->name('react');

But, I had to do this in Lumen (Not a Blade file):

<script src="/js/app.js" defer></script>

with

$router->get('/{all:.*}', function() {
    return view('app');
});