API Authentication with Sanctum

Let's start preparing to have a mobile app along with our web page. Here's our action plan:

• Installing Laravel API engine (which sets up route file, installs sanctum)
• Create Auth endpoints for Login and Registration
• Create a Profile update endpoint
• In the next lesson: Build API endpoints for Events and Talks

Let's get started!

Installing Laravel API

Our first step is to install Laravel API scaffolding:

php artisan install:api

This will install Sanctum into our application and set up a few things:

• Create and register api.php routes file
• Create sanctum.php configuration file
• Create personal_access_tokens table

The only thing we have to do is add a trait to our Users Model:

app/Models/User.php

use Laravel\Sanctum\HasApiTokens; 
 
// ...
 
class User extends Authenticatable
{
    /** @use HasFactory<\Database\Factories\UserFactory> */
    use HasFactory, Notifiable;
    use HasFactory, Notifiable, HasApiTokens;
    // ...
}

Once this is done, we are ready to create our first API endpoints.

Creating Authentication Endpoints

Let's start our API implementation by creating the first endpoints:

• One for Registration
• One for Login
• One for User details

These endpoints will live in a single Controller for our use case: