How to Protect a Laravel App with a WAF Before PHP Starts
A Laravel application can validate input, escape output, and reject some bad requests inside controllers. That still leaves a gap. Hostile HTTP traffic reaches PHP before those checks run. If you are working through how to protect a Laravel app with a WAF, treat the job as a front-door decision: put a reverse-proxy firewall on the public side, keep Laravel as the upstream, and refuse any setup the supplied product docs do not actually describe. SafeLine is a self-hosted web application firewall.
🎯 Vulnerability: Web Security Vulnerability
💡 Defense Fix: Implement strict input validation, contextual output encoding, and enforce least-privilege authorization controls.