Laravel Sanctum API Authentication: The Complete...

There's a quiet assumption baked into almost every Laravel AI integration tutorial: authentication exists. Routes are protected. Tokens are issued. The API is locked down. That assumption breaks the moment you sit down to build something real. Laravel Sanctum is the framework's answer to lightweight API token authentication. It ships with Laravel, it integrates cleanly with Eloquent, and it handles the two most common authentication patterns - SPA cookie-based sessions and mobile/external API to