This package is no longer maintained as Laravel already has a similar feature built-in since Laravel 5.8 and Laravel 6.x. Documentation on Laravel's API authentication can be found here. Furthermore, since Laravel 7.x, there is a new Laravel package called Airlock/Sanctum that would better serve API authentication purposes.

A simple way of authenticating your APIs with API keys using Laravel. This package uses the following libraries:

• philsturgeon's Fractal
• maximebeaudoin's api-response

**Laravel 5.3.x onwards: ~4.*

**Laravel 5.1.x to 5.2.x: ~3.*

**Laravel 5.1.x: ~2.*

**Laravel 4.2.x: ~1.* (Recently updated version for Laravel 4. Please note that there are namespace changes here)

**Laravel 4.2.x: 0.* (The version that most of you are using)

Run composer require chrisbjr/api-guard 4.*

In your config/app.php add Chrisbjr\ApiGuard\Providers\ApiGuardServiceProvider to the end of the providers array

'providers' => array(

    ...
    Chrisbjr\ApiGuard\Providers\ApiGuardServiceProvider::class,
),

Now publish the migration and configuration files for api-guard:

$ php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Chrisbjr\ApiGuard\Providers\ApiGuardServiceProvider"

Then run the migration:

$ php artisan migrate

It will setup api_keys table.

Once you're done with the required setup, you can now generate your first API key.

Run the following command to generate an API key:

php artisan api-key:generate

Generally, the ApiKey object is a polymorphic object meaning this can belong to more than one other model.

To generate an API key that is linked to another object (a "user", for example), you can do the following:

+php artisan api-key:generate --id=1 --type="App\User"

To specify that a model can have API keys, you can attach the Apikeyable trait to the model:

use Chrisbjr\ApiGuard\Models\Mixins\Apikeyable;

class User extends Model
{
    use Apikeyable;

    ...
}

This will attach the following methods to the model:

// Get the API keys of the object
$user->apiKeys();

// Create an API key for the object
$user->createApiKey();

To generate an API key from within your application, you can use the following method in the ApiKey model:

$apiKey = Chrisbjr\ApiGuard\Models\ApiKey::make()

// Attach a model to the API key
$apiKey = Chrisbjr\ApiGuard\Models\ApiKey::make($model)

You can start using ApiGuard by simply attaching the auth.apikey middleware to your API route:

Route::middleware(['auth.apikey'])->get('/test', function (Request $request) {
    return $request->user(); // Returns the associated model to the API key
});

This effectively secures your API with an API key which needs to specified in the X-Authorization header. This can be configured in config/apiguard.php.

Here is a sample cURL command to demonstrate:

curl -X GET \
  https://apiguard.dev/api/test \
  -H 'x-authorization: api-key-here'

You might also want to attach this middleware to your api middleware group in your app/Http/Kernel.php to take advantage of other Laravel features such as throttling.

/**
 * The application's route middleware groups.
 *
 * @var array
 */
protected $middlewareGroups = [
    ...

    'api' => [
        'throttle:60,1',
        'bindings',
        'auth.apikey',
    ],
];

If you noticed in the basic example, you can also access the attached model to the API key by calling $request->user(). We are attaching the related model in this method because in most use cases, this is actually the user.

Unauthorized requests will get a 401 status response with the following JSON:

{
  "error": {
    "code": "401",
    "http_code": "GEN-UNAUTHORIZED",
    "message": "Unauthorized."
  }
}

The ApiGuardController takes advantage of Fractal and api-response libraries.

This enables us to easily create APIs with models and use transformers to give a standardized JSON response.

Here is an example:

Let's say you have the following model:

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Book extends Model
{
    protected $fillable = [
        'name',
    ];
}

You can make a basic controller which will return all books like this:

use Chrisbjr\ApiGuard\Http\Controllers\ApiGuardController;
use App\Transformers\BookTransformer;
use App\Book;

class BooksController extends ApiGuardController
{
    public function all()
    {
        $books = Book::all();

        return $this->response->withCollection($books, new BookTransformer);
    }
}

Now, you'll need to make the transformer for your Book object. Transformers help with defining and manipulating the variables you want to return to your JSON response.

use League\Fractal\TransformerAbstract;
use App\Book;

class BookTransformer extends TransformerAbstract
{
    public function transform(Book $book)
    {
        return [
            'id'         => $book->id,
            'name'       => $book->name,
            'created_at' => $book->created_at,
            'updated_at' => $book->updated_at,
        ];
    }
}

Once you have this accessible in your routes, you will get the following response from the controller:

{
  "data": {
    "id": 1,
    "title": "The Great Adventures of Chris",
    "created_at": {
      "date": "2017-05-25 18:54:18",
      "timezone_type": 3,
      "timezone": "UTC"
    },
    "updated_at": {
      "date": "2017-05-25 18:54:18",
      "timezone_type": 3,
      "timezone": "UTC"
    }
  }
}

More examples can be found on the Github page: https://github.com/ellipsesynergie/api-response.

To learn more about transformers, visit the PHP League's documentation on Fractal: Fractal

ApiGuard comes with a request class that can handle validation of requests for you and throw a standard response.

You can create a Request class as you usually do but in order to get a standard JSON response you'll have to extend the ApiGuardFormRequest class.

use Chrisbjr\ApiGuard\Http\Requests\ApiGuardFormRequest;

class BookStoreRequest extends ApiGuardFormRequest
{
    public function authorize()
    {
        return true;
    }

    public function rules()
    {
        return [
            'name' => 'required',
        ];
    }
}

Now you can use this in your controller as you normally do with Laravel:

use Chrisbjr\ApiGuard\Http\Controllers\ApiGuardController;
use App\Transformers\BookTransformer;
use App\Book;

class BooksController extends ApiGuardController
{
    public function store(BookStoreRequest $request)
    {
        // Request should already be validated

        $book = Book::create($request->all())

        return $this->response->withItem($book, new BookTransformer);
    }
}

If the request failed to pass the validation rules, it will return with a response like the following:

{
  "error": {
    "code": "GEN-UNPROCESSABLE",
    "http_code": 422,
    "message": {
      "name": [
        "The name field is required."
      ]
    }
  }
}