Best way to store laravel API tokens? - laravel

Question

I'm currently setting up a new project in Laravel.
Upon logging in I want to store the logged in user's token. so, I can make other API request in other controllers using this format,
Code:
$response = $client->request('POST', '/api/user', [
'headers' => [
'Authorization' => 'Bearer '.$token,
'Accept' => 'application/json',
],]);
I'm not quite sure, how I will store $token so it can be accessed in all controllers.

Answer 1

Normally, APIs that use token based authentication require the token to be sent with each request as the APIs are, hopefully, stateless. This means that whatever controller of yours is handling the user request will also have the token to perform other requests in the background. In your controller, you should be able to retrieve the token like so:
class MyController
{
public function index(Request $request)
{
$authorization = $request->header('Authorization');
$token = null;
if (substr($authorization, 0, 7) === "Bearer ") {
$token = substr($authorization, 7);
}
// in theory, this is obsolete as your controller should only
// be called if there is a valid token present on the request
if ($token === null) {
abort(403); // or whatever
}
$client = ...; // initialize the client
$response = $client->request('POST', '/api/user', [
'headers' => [
'Authorization' => 'Bearer '.$token,
'Accept' => 'application/json',
],
]);
// return some response to the user
}
}
Obviously it makes sense to extract the token parsing into its own function which lives in a base controller that all other controllers inherit from. In your concrete example you could also simply use ['headers' => ['Authorization' => $request->header('Authorization')]] as you only want to forward the header.
Old answer which doesn't make any sense:
Store the token in the session data of the user:
session(['token' => $token]);
The array indicates that you set data in the session. Retrieving the token is even easier:
$token = session('token');