Laravel 5 Authentication: make Controller decides which methods are public - laravel

Question

This is a very long question for (I think) a very simple answer, but I am a total newbie in Laravel and I need to know if I am addressing it the right way.
What I did
I followed the Intermediate Tutorial and modified it just a little bit, and now I have a simple task list that uses authentication. I had this in my TaskController constructor:
public function __construct(TaskRepository $tasks)
{
$this->middleware('auth');
}
This checks if the user is logged in before launching any methods, so I just need to call them like this in my routes file:
Route::get('/home', 'TaskController#index');
Route::get('/tasks', 'TaskController#indexUser');
Then I wanted to remove the authentication requirement for the index method, so that all users can see the /home page (where I list all the tasks), and only authenticated users can see the /tasks page (where I list only the user tasks and allow to delete them). I managed to do it like this:
1) I removed $this->middleware('auth') from the TaskController constructor
2) I modified my routes file to look like this:
Route::get('/home', 'TaskController#index');
Route::get('/tasks', [
'middleware' => 'auth',
'uses' => 'TaskController#indexUser'
]);
Ok, this works, but:
What I want to achieve
I don't want to have this logic in my routes file, I want that my Controller decides which methods are public and which not. But I got stuck. I think it should be something like this:
class TaskController extends Controller
{
/**
* Display a list of all current tasks
*/
public function index()
{
return view('tasks.index', [
'tasks' => Task::orderBy('created_at', 'asc')->get()
]);
}
/**
* Display a list of all of the logged user's task.
*
*/
public function indexUser(Request $request)
{
if (Auth::check() {
return view('tasks.index_user', [
'tasks' => $this->tasks->forUser($request->user()),
]);
} else {
//This is what I don't know how to do:
redirect_to_login
}
}
}
How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

You can decide which controller method should execute the middleware:
public function __construct()
{
$this->middleware('auth', ['only' => ['indexUser', 'update'] ];
}
just add in only the method you want to protect.
When a user try to access a method will automatically redirect to the login page.
Here you can find the documentation: https://laravel.com/docs/5.1/controllers#controller-middleware

Answer 2

You can do the following if you want this logic in your controller:
if (!Auth::check()) {
return redirect('/path/to/login/page');
}
This way you don't have giant if else statement in your controller. (Handy if your controller contains more logic then the sample above)
I personally would go for the answer Christian Giupponi provided. Cause it makes much more sense to handle this logic in the construct function then in your controller.