Laravel 5.7 tokenmismatch error when trying to post form - laravel

Question

I'm running laravel 5.7, I changed the sessions to the database. I did make:auth and tried to register and got an error page with
"The page has expired due to inactivity. Please refresh and try again"
I have been at this for a couple of days now. I added /register to the except array to bypass the verify token and was able to register. Now I'm trying to login and get the same issue. I have **cleared cache, checked settings, switched back to file, tried other browsers, verified the token was in the form, make sure it was in the header, made sure it was getting passed and still nothing. I added this to the Handler class in Exceptions:
if ($exception instanceof \Illuminate\Session\TokenMismatchException) {
return redirect()->back()->with('error_message',"Oops! Seems there was an error with login. Please try again or contact us.");
}
and this leaves me to believe the token is not matching because it redirects instead of going to the broken page. I have read through I think every article on the internet and cannot figure this out. My next option is to start fresh with a new install unless anyone has any idea what could cause this?
This was on my local. I have not pushed anything to production.
Edited to add Form:
{!! Form::open(['route' => 'login', 'method' => 'post']) !!}
<div class="form-group{{ $errors->has('email') ? ' has-error' : '' }}">
<label for="email" class="col-md-4 control-label">E-Mail Address</label>
<div class="col-md-12">
<input id="email" type="email" class="form-control" name="email" value="{{ old('email') }}" required autofocus>
#if ($errors->has('email'))
<span class="help-block">
<strong>{{ $errors->first('email') }}</strong>
</span>
#endif
</div>
</div>
<div class="form-group{{ $errors->has('password') ? ' has-error' : '' }}">
<label for="password" class="col-md-4 control-label">Password</label>
<div class="col-md-12">
<input id="password" type="password" class="form-control" name="password" required>
#if ($errors->has('password'))
<span class="help-block">
<strong>{{ $errors->first('password') }}</strong>
</span>
#endif
</div>
</div>
<div class="form-group">
<div class="col-md-6 offset-md-4">
<div class="checkbox">
<label>
<input type="checkbox" name="remember" {{ old('remember') ? 'checked' : '' }}> Remember Me
</label>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="form-group">
<div class="col-md-8 offset-md-4">
<button type="submit" class="btn btn-primary">Login </button>
<a class="btn btn-link" href="{{ route('password.request') }}">
Forgot Your Password?
</a>
</div>
</div>
{!! Form::close() !!}

Answer 1

Try using a different browser to login or an incognito window.
Also remember on any form where you are POST-ing to use the #csrf in your blade file.

Answer 2

This problem comes from CSRF token validation which fails:
'The page has expired due to inactivity. Please refresh and try
again.'
you should include a hidden CSRF token field in the form so that the CSRF protection middleware can validate the request.
<form method="POST" action="/profile">
#csrf
...
</form>
It doesn't work, then Refresh the browser cache and now it might work

Answer 3

There should not accure any errors, so if you only want to create the auth scaffolding I would suggest just to create a new laravel project.
Do following steps:
laravel new app
create the database
Add the database credentials to your .env file
run php artisan:migrate in your command line, inside your project, that should create you a users table
run php artisan make:auth, that is going to create the basic auth logic
Lastly run php artisan migrate again

Answer 4

In case someone in the future comes here and tries all the solutions out there and they dont work I wanted to share what finally worked for me. I started by installing a new instance of laravel 5.8. I did make:auth and checked that the standard forms works as expected. I then added in the code from the instance that was not working which was basically my custom app.blade.php, header.blade.php,footer.blade.php,welcome.blade.php register.blade.php, helpers.php ( contains my custom helper functions ) and updated composer.json with the packages I use. I ran composer update and it did not work. I went back to the beginning and added each piece individually until I found the issue. I am not sure why this happened but the issue was this:
I have a custom file within app/ called helpers.php. I add it via composer.json like this:
"autoload": {
"classmap": [
"database/seeds",
"database/factories"
],
"psr-4": {
"App\\": "app/"
},
"files": [
"app/Http/helpers.php"
]
},
I have one function in there that I use to wrap files in that adds in my aws S3 endpoint. Thats it. But for some reason this was causing the site to redirect on every page load back to itself and give me a new session. I would refresh over and over and just watch the session files accumulate. I read that the helper functions are getting deprecated in 5.9 so I went ahead and created a provider then use that in place of my helper function which did the trick.
If someone knows why this happens I would love to hear it. But if you have this issue, open up the sessions folder in your editor and see if you keep getting new sessions. If so then backtrack and see whats causing it to reroute.