Middleware

The Middleware package runs route middleware around the final request handler.

Use it when you want route-level request gates such as authentication, ownership checks, validation, or redirects before the controller action runs.

This package is intentionally small. It provides:

Quantum\Middleware\Middleware, the base contract every middleware class extends
Quantum\Middleware\MiddlewareManager, the runtime pipeline that resolves and executes middleware classes for a matched route
Quantum\Middleware\Exceptions\MiddlewareException for missing middleware classes and invalid middleware type handling

When this package runs

MiddlewareManager is created from a matched route and then applies middleware in two stages:

framework middleware
module middleware

In the current implementation, the framework stage adds rate limiting when the route has a rate-limit definition. After that, the manager runs the route's module middleware list in order and finally calls the terminal handler.

When a route combines group middleware and route-specific middleware, the group entries wrap the route entries. That keeps shared gates such as Auth at the outside of the pipeline and leaves route-specific checks for the inner stage.

What middleware classes look like

Every middleware extends Quantum\Middleware\Middleware and implements:

use Closure;
use Quantum\Http\Request;
use Quantum\Http\Response;
use Quantum\Middleware\Middleware;

final class Auth extends Middleware
{
    public function apply(Request $request, Closure $next): Response
    {
        if (!auth()->check()) {
            return redirect('/signin');
        }

        return $next($request);
    }
}

A middleware can:

return its own response and stop the pipeline
call $next($request) and let the request continue

Important constraints

Middleware names are resolved to module classes only. There is no alias registry or container-based middleware resolution in this package.
The manager instantiates each middleware directly with new $middlewareClass($request).
The resolved class extends Quantum\Middleware\Middleware.
Missing classes raise MiddlewareException; wrong base types raise the shared base exception for invalid inheritance.
Rate limiting, when present on the route, always runs before module middleware.