Matt Stauffer has a new post in his series looking at the features in the latest version of the Laravel framework (v5.2) with this look at guard drivers and how 5.2 allows you to use more than one at once.

Let's get back to Laravel 5.2 features, shall we? 5.2 introduced a significant boost to the power of the entire authentication system, including making it much simpler to have multiple "guards" running at once. The default authentication guard in Laravel prior to 5.2 (now named the web guard) is your traditional web-based application authentication layer: username and password post to a controller. [...] But what if you want to have an API running in the same app, and it uses JSON web tokens (or some other stateless, non-session authentication mechanism)? In the past you'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to have multiple authentication drivers running at the same time.

He shows how to edit the auth.php configuration file to add in more "guard" instances to the default request handling. He also talks about the new driver that backends the "api" guard: the token driver. He briefly introduces the driver and talks about how it works with the current authentication setup. He also looks at changes you can make to use non-default drivers in your auth requests and how to set up your own custom drivers.