Laravel says "Route not defined"

This thread is old but was the first one to come up so I thought id share my solution too. Apart from having named routes in your routes.php file. This error can also occur when you have duplicate URLs in your routes file, but with different names, the error can be misleading in this scenario. Example:

Route::any('official/form/reject-form', 'FormStatus@rejectForm')
                                           ->name('reject-form');  

Route::any('official/form/accept-form', 'FormStatus@acceptForm')
                                           ->name('accept-form');

Changing one of the names solves the problem. Copy, pasting, & fatigue can lead you to this problem :).

If route is not defined, then check web.php routing file.

Route::get('/map', 'NavigationController@map')->name('map'); // note the name() method.

Then you can use this method in the views:

<a class="nav-link" href="{{ route('map') }}">{{ __('Map') }}</a>

PS: the __('Map') is to translate "Map" to the current language.

And the list of names for routes you can see with artisan command:

php artisan route:list

I'm using Laravel 5.7 and tried all of the above answers but nothing seemed to be hitting the spot.

For me, it was a rather simple fix by removing the cache files created by Laravel.
It seemed that my changes were not being reflected, and therefore my application wasn't seeing the routes.

A bit overkill, but I decided to reset all my cache at the same time using the following commands:

php artisan route:clear
php artisan view:clear
php artisan cache:clear

The main one here is the first command which will delete the bootstrap/cache/routes.php file.
The second command will remove the cached files for the views that are stored in the storage/framework/cache folder.
Finally, the last command will clear the application cache.

when you execute the command

php artisan route:list

You will see all your registered routes in there in table format . Well there you see many columns like Method , URI , Name , Action .. etc.

So basically if you are using route() method that means it will accept only name column values and if you want to use URI column values you should go with url() method of laravel.

One more cause for this:

If the routes are overridden with the same URI (Unknowingly), it causes this error:

Eg:

Route::get('dashboard', ['uses' => 'SomeController@index', 'as' => 'my.dashboard']);
Route::get('dashboard/', ['uses' => 'SomeController@dashboard', 'as' => 'my.home_dashboard']);

In this case route 'my.dashboard' is invalidate as the both routes has same URI ('dashboard', 'dashboard/')

Solution: You should change the URI for either one

Eg:

Route::get('dashboard', ['uses' => 'SomeController@index', 'as' => 'my.dashboard']);
Route::get('home-dashboard', ['uses' => 'SomeController@dashboard', 'as' => 'my.home_dashboard']); 

// See the URI changed for this 'home-dashboard'

Hope it helps some once.

My case is a bit different, since it is not a form but to return a view. Add method ->name('route').

MyView.blade.php looks like this:

<a href="{{route('admin')}}">CATEGORIES</a>

And web.php routes file is defined like this:

Route::view('admin', 'admin.index')->name('admin');

i had the same issue and find the solution lately.

you should check if your route is rather inside a route::group

like here:

Route::group(['prefix' => 'Auth', 'as' => 'Auth.', 'namespace' => 'Auth', 'middleware' => 'Auth']

if so you should use it in the view file. like here:

!! Form::model(Auth::user(), ['method' => 'PATCH', 'route' => 'Auth.preferences/' . Auth::user()->id]) !!}

In my case the solution was simple:

I have defined the route at the very start of the route.php file.

After moving the named route to the bottom, my app finally saw it. It means that somehow the route was defined too early.

On a side note:

I had the similar issues where many times I get the error Action method not found, but clearly it is define in controller.

The issue is not in controller, but rather how routes.php file is setup

Lets say you have Controller class set as a resource in route.php file

Route::resource('example', 'ExampleController');

then '/example' will have all RESTful Resource listed here: http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/controllers#restful-resource-controllers

but now you want to have some definition in form e.g: 'action'=>'ExampleController@postStore' then you have to change this route (in route.php file) to:

Route::controller('example', 'ExampleController');

In my case, I was using a duplicate method. I was trying to update like this:

Route::get('/preferences/{id}', 'UserController@edit');
Route::get('/preferences/{id}', 'UserController@update');

When what I meant to do was something similar to this:

Route::get('/preferences/{id}', 'UserController@edit');
Route::post('/preferences/{id}', 'UserController@update');

Notice the get and post methods are different but the URLs are the same.

Please note that the command

php artisan route:list

Or to get more filter down list

php artisan route:list | grep your_route|your_controller

the forth column tells you the names of routes that are registered (usually generated by Route::resource)

My issue was that I was passing the route function to a method that, in turn, uses another route call under the hood!

Always check the implementation of the method to which you intend to pass the route:

For example, The issue is undefined because the to_route function itself utilizes the route function internally

// Wrong:

to_route(route('route_name'));

// Do this

to_route('route_name');

// Wrong

$this->get('/example')->assertRedirectToRoute(route('confirm'));

// Do this

$this->get('/example')->assertRedirectToRoute('confirm');