The Laravelista.com site has a new tutorial posted showing you how to integrate JSON Web Tokens (JWT) into a Lumen application. JWTs provide a simple, portable way to share authentication and session information in a more robust way than just a single randomly generated token.

This is my third post on how to build an API with Fractal, but in this post I will be focusing on authentication using JWT (JSON Web Tokens). [...] In Build an API with Lumen and Fractal I have shown you a way of creating an API using Lumen and Fractal. In this post we will continue with the same project called Treeline and implement authentication and protected routes. Also at the very end of the post is a small chapter on when to use Lumen over Laravel.

They make use of the tymon/jwt-auth library to handle the actual JWT functionality including a service provider making it simple to integrate. They talk about "improving Lumen" by adding a configuration directory for the JWT package to put its configuration file. From there they add in the necessary facades and configuring the library itself. Next comes the actual authentication handling that, post login, generates the token and resending it along with each response. Finally, they show you how to set up the protection on routes and verifying the token contents on each request.