In his continuing series of posts looking at the upcoming features in the next version of the Laravel framework (v5.3) Matt Stauffer has posted about a new security-related offering that was recently announced at the Laracon US conference: Laravel Passport.

API authentication can be tricky. OAuth 2 is the reigning ruler of the various standards that you might consider, but it's complex and difficult to implement—even with the great packages available (League and Luca).

[...] Laravel Passport is native OAuth 2 server for Laravel apps. Like Cashier and Scout, you'll bring it into your app with Composer. It uses the League OAuth2 Server package as a dependency but provides a simple, easy-to-learn and easy-to-implement syntax.

He briefly mentions the "groundwork" that was laid for Passport in v5.2 and the application of different authentication mechanisms at different times. He then moves into the installation and configuration of the Passport system (it's not bundled so it's a separate install). He then talks about the management API that's automatically set up, the Vue.js frontend for managing clients and tokens and what it looks like when one is requested. He also provides a bit of sample code you can use to test it out for yourself once you've created a client and token on your system. He ends the post talking about the command line token generation of "personal" tokens and using middleware "scopes" to allow for easier cross-authorizations between routes.