Laravel giving 404 error even though user not authenticated - laravel

Question

I am creating an api using Laravel 4.1. I am having problem with authentication and custom errors. I want to check first if the user is authenticated and then show error message. For example localhost:8080/trips/1 is not a valid a resource; if I go to that url it giving me 404 not found error even though I am not authenticated. My point is to check the authentication first then the errors. I am using laravel http basic authentication. Here is my filter code:
Route::filter('api.auth', function()
{
if (!Request::getUser())
{
App::abort(401, 'A valid API key is required');
}
$user = User::where('api_key', '=', Request::getUser())->first();
if (!$user)
{
App::abort(401);
}
Auth::login($user);
});
Here is my custom errors:
App::error(function(Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Exception\HttpException $e, $code)
{
$headers = $e->getHeaders();
switch ($code)
{
case 401:
$default_message = 'Invalid API key';
$headers['WWW-Authenticate'] = 'Basic realm="REST API"';
break;
case 403:
$default_message = 'Insufficient privileges to perform this action';
break;
case 404:
$default_message = 'The requested resource was not found';
break;
default:
$default_message = 'An error was encountered';
}
return Response::json(array(
'error' => $e->getMessage() ?: $default_message,
), $code, $headers);
});
Here is my routes:
Route::group(array('before' => 'api.auth'), function()
{
Route::resource('trips', 'TripController', array(
'except' => array('create', 'edit')
));
});
The error code is executing before the filters thats why I am getting 404 error instead of getting 401. Is there any way to execute filter first then the error ?

Answer 1

I got this issue too and the way I worked around it (though I was not a fan at all) was doing the following inside the group(s) that don't contain a route sending requests to a controller's index method:
Route::any('/', function(){});
Granted, this shouldn't be how it works, the filter should trigger no matter what.