One of the most common questions when building an API with Laravel is: Sanctum or Passport? Both are official Laravel packages for API authentication, but they have different purposes and ways of working. Choosing the wrong one can make development more complicated than it needs to be. This article will help you understand the differences in depth.
What Is Laravel Sanctum?
Laravel Sanctum is a lightweight, simple authentication system. Sanctum is designed for two main use cases:
- SPA (Single Page Application) — such as Vue.js or React communicating with a Laravel backend.
- Mobile apps / simple token-based APIs — tokens are stored in a database table.
Sanctum uses cookie-based sessions for SPAs and personal access tokens for mobile/simple APIs. There is no OAuth2 implementation here.
What Is Laravel Passport?
Laravel Passport is a full OAuth2 server implementation for Laravel. Passport uses the league/oauth2-server library under the hood. Passport is a good fit for:
- APIs accessed by third-party clients.
- Scenarios that require OAuth2 grant types: authorization code, client credentials, password grant, and so on.
- Large platforms that need granular OAuth2 token management.
This is only part of the article. For the full discussion, with examples and step-by-step details, you can read it on the original source:
Laravel Sanctum vs Passport: Which One to Choose?
More programming tutorials and developer tools are also available at dhiecoderweb.com.
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