On Medium.com Christopher Pitt has written up a tutorial showing off an authentication system in Laravel 4, a recently popular framework that's still a little light on tutorials for more advanced topics...like authentication.

Laravel 4 is a huge step forward for the PHP community. It’s beautifully written, full of features and the community is presently exploding. It’s with this in mind that I would like to show how to build an authenticated application using Laravel 4.

His example (the code is over on github too) shows you how to:

• Get Laravel installed and up and running
• Configure the database and create the needed tables
• Making a migration for the structure
• Making the model and "seeder" for some sample data
• Configuring the authentication pieces

The code to create the controller and views are also included as well as the method you'll need to use for authenticating the given user credentials. There's no signup functionality in this example, but password reset and logout are covered.