Custom validation not working in Laravel 5.4 - validation

Question

Working on a Laravel application whereby am working on the backend validation of two dates. The 2 dates are mainly departureDate and returnDate respectively.
On the departure date am trying to validate it to be required, should be of type date and should be a date after today. On the return date I am also trying to implement a validation logic whereby return date should be 3 days or more after departure date but it should be less than 180 days after departure date.
Validate function
public function validateDates(Request $request){
//dd($request->all());
$now = new \DateTime();
$after_date = $now->parse($this->departureDate)->addDays(3);
$maxdays = $now->parse($this->departureDate)->addDays(180);
$validation = $this->validate($request, [
'departureDate' => 'required|date|after:now',
'returnDate' => 'required|date_format:"Y-m-d"|after:' . $after_date->toDateString().'|before:' . $maxdays->toDateString()
],
[
'departureDate.after' => 'Your departure date should be tomorrow or any date in the future',
'returnDate.after' => 'Your return date should be 3 or more days after the departure date',
'returnDate.before' => 'Your return date should be no more than 180 days from the departure date',
]
};

Answer 1

I think your logic is fine. You are, however, probably looking to use Carbon instead. It has the parse() method you are looking for. Also addDays() and toDateString().
So, on top of your file, add the following statement:
use Carbon\Carbon;
and then change your validateDate() method to this one:
public function validateDates(Request $request)
{
$after_date = Carbon::parse($this->departureDate)->addDays(3)->toDateString();
$max_days = Carbon::parse($this->departureDate)->addDays(180)->toDateString();
$validation = $this->validate($request,
[
'departureDate' => 'required|date|after:now',
'returnDate' => 'required|date_format:"Y-m-d"|after:' . $after_date . '|before:' . $max_days
],
[
'departureDate.after' => 'Your departure date should be tomorrow or any date in the future',
'returnDate.after' => 'Your return date should be 3 or more days after the departure date',
'returnDate.before' => 'Your return date should be no more than 180 days from the departure date',
]
);
};
I am assuming that you have your departureDate defined somewhere and hence you are using $this->departureDate, but if it's coming from your request instead, you should change that to $request->departureDate for example.