Fire event on Eloquent User Model password property update - laravel

Question

I have a User model with a password property.
If I retrieve it from the Database using:
$user = User::find(3);
And change the password value(in Controller):
$user->password = Input::get('passwordValue')
I want to trigger the Eloquent updating event that will first create a salt and concatenate the $salt with $passwordValue before assigning the value to $user->password something like:
$user->password = md5($salt . $passwordValue)
After this I can save the $user:
$user->save();
I want this event to fire every time the user changes his password in his profile page.

Answer 1

You can define a setter for the password field in your model:
public function setPasswordAttribute($value)
{
$salt = 'whatever';
$this->attributes['password'] = md5($salt.$value);
}
Then, in your controller (or whatever) code, just set the password using the plaintext version:
$user->password = Input::get('new_password');
However, it should be noted that, in Laravel, you really shouldn't be setting the password by using md5 with a salt, but instead use the hashing functions that Laravel provides:
$this->attributes['password'] = Hash::make($value);
That'll create a much stronger, bcrypt-generated password. You do, however, have to change the way you check the password, though it's pretty simple:
if (Hash::check($plaintext_password, $user->password)) {
// password is correct
}
However, further to this, you should use the Auth functions to handle logins so you don't even need to use Hash::check() directly:
if (Auth::attempt(array('username' => Input::get('username'), 'password' => Input::get('password'))) {
// logged in, redirect
} else {
// attempt failed, set message and redirect
}