Laravel Passport usage with Swaggervel v2.3

Overview

I've been using this Swaggervel package with almost all my recent Laravel projects. A few instances were lightly customized to work against different authentication schemes and I only briefly touched on using Laravel Passport.

I wanted to highlight a few areas while also offering up an example project as a lightly opinionated jumping off point. Just the highlights cover quite a bit of information but the example should have ample information in commit messages and in the finished product.

Setting up Laravel and Laravel Passport

First we run laravel new <project_name>, git init and commit immediately to mark our base Laravel installation. I've always preferred this immediate commit over making customizations first as it's far easier to track your customizations versus the base install. Next, we run through the Laravel Passport docs with the following caveats:

• php artisan vendor:publish --tag=passport-migrations doesn't copy the migrations as expected. We manually do this.
• php artisan migrate --step creates a migration batch for each migration file individually. This lets us rollback to individual steps and is primarily personal preference.
• app/Providers/AuthServiceProvider contains the following:

Passport::routes(function (RouteRegistrar $routeRegistrar) {
    $routeRegistrar->all();
});
Passport::tokensCan([
]);
Passport::enableImplicitGrant();
Passport::tokensExpireIn(Carbon::now()->addDays(15));
Passport::refreshTokensExpireIn(Carbon::now()->addDays(30));

• Run artisan make:auth to utilize the app layout and create a home view that is protected by the Login prompt.
  • The Passport Vue components could be displayed on the welcome page but we're attempting to set future users up for better practices.
• Create a proper WelcomeController with matching view that utilizes the same app layout
  • This is not necessary but this one step makes it possible to properly utilize artisan route:cache in the future as route closures aren't supported.

Setting up Swaggervel

Now that the basics are complete, we bring in Swaggervel via composer require appointer/swaggervel --dev. We can ignore the line in the documentation that mentions adding Appointer\Swaggervel\SwaggervelServiceProvider::class as that's only for Laravel versions earlier than 5.5 without package discovery. It's necessary to run artisan vendor:publish to publish the content as we're using this package as a dev dependency and the assets won't show up otherwise. Now that Swaggervel is in place we can bring it all together.

To start, we create the file app/Http/Controllers/Api/v1/Controller.php as our generic API base controller. This controller houses our root-level @SWG\Info definition in a convenient location. This also sets us up for future work where API controllers are versioned, though this is personal preference. The secret sauce is the @SWG\SecurityScheme annotation:

/**
 * @SWG\SecurityScheme(
 * securityDefinition="passport-swaggervel_auth",
 * description="OAuth2 grant provided by Laravel Passport",
 * type="oauth2",
 * authorizationUrl="/oauth/authorize",
 * tokenUrl="/oauth/token",
 * flow="accessCode",
 * scopes={
 * *
 * }
 * ),
 */

The securityDefinition property is arbitrary but needs to be included in every protected route definition. You can specify multiple security schemes to cover things like an generic api key or likely multiple OAuth flows, though I haven't tried working out the latter.These are the supported flows and it's important to note that Swaggervel is currently on the OpenAPI 2.0 specification, though this may change in the future. The scopes specified includes everything (*) but we could define any scopes explicitly. It should be noted that we also need to setup the route definitions in our resource Controller classes but due to the verbosity they are too much to include in this post. A small snippet that is unique to working with this setup is the following:

* security={
* {
* "passport-swaggervel_auth": {"*"}
* }
* },

This tells a specific endpoint to use the securityDefinition created earlier and it's important that these match. The example project has rudimentary UserController, User model, and UserRequest definitions that should be a decent starting point, though I can't vouch for them being very comprehensive.

Configuring our OAuth Client

First we need to create an OAuth client specifically for Swaggervel connections. Go to the /home endpoint and under OAuth Clients click Create New Client. Under Name specify Laravel Passport Swaggervel or just Swaggervel. Under Redirect URL we're unable to specify /vendor/swaggervel/oauth2-redirect.html directly, so use a placeholder like https://passport-swaggervel.test/vendor/swaggervel/oauth2-redirect.html instead. Using your SQL toolbox of choice, navigate to the table oauth_clients and look for the row with the name specified in the previous step, in our case Laravel Passport Swaggervel. Manually update the redirect column to /vendor/swaggervel/oauth2-redirect.html.

Now that our OAuth client in Passport should be setup correctly, we focus our attention on the config/swaggervel.php settings. The client-id should be set to what Passport shows in the UI as the Client ID field. This is also the id of the row in the oauth_clients table. The client-secret should be set to the what Passport shows in the UI as the Secret field. We also set both secure-protocol and init-o-auth to true, the latter of which fills in the UI with our secrets otherwise we'd have to put them in manually.

Correcting Swagger UI to Capture Tokens

For the OAuth2 redirect to function properly we need to modify the Swagger UI configuration in resources/views/vendor/swaggervel/index.blade.php. Under const ui = SwaggerUIBundle({ right below the url parameter should be oauth2RedirectUrl: '/vendor/swaggervel/oauth2-redirect.html',. This reinforcement is necessary as the Swagger UI doesn't 'catch' the tokens properly without this. Other notable additions that make the UI slightly easier to work with:

tagsSorter: 'alpha',
operationsSorter: 'alpha',
docExpansion: 'list',
filter: true

Testing Authentication via the Swagger UI

First we go to the api/docs endpoint to display the Swagger UI. Click the Authorize button with the unlocked padlock icon. Verify the client_id and client_secret sections are filled in. Click Authorize and the Laravel Passport screen labelled Authorization Request should display with the Authorize and Cancel buttons. Click Authorize again and you should be redirected back to Swagger with the client_id and client_secret now showing as ****** with a Logout button instead of Authorize. We should now be able to click on the GET /users route, click the Try it out button, click on the blue Execute button and be greeted with our expected response as a list of users.

Conclusion

We've hopefully highlighted the basic touch points of the process with the example code going into much further detail. The project is lightly opinionated to facilitate practices that have served me well so far. It is by no means a complete reference but it should be a good jumping off point when it's somewhat harder to see the big picture without a comprehensive example.

In case you need the link to the project again.