Generate Authentication for a Laravel 5.3 Web Application

In this tutorial we are going to generate an authentication system to register and log users in using Laravel 5.3. We will use a SQLite database for persistence in our application.

Generating the application

You must have Laravel 5.3 installed. Laravel depends on PHP >= 5.4, MySQL, Composer and a few PHP extensions. If you do not have Laravel on your computer, check out the install docs. In this post we will cover setting up a Laravel 5.3 web application. Run these commands in the terminal to generate the application:

$ composer create-project laravel/laravel laravel-5.3-app "5.3" --prefer-dist
$ cd laravel-5.3-app/
$ php artisan serve

This will launch a web server in your browser. You can view it on localhost:8000 in the browser.

If you have issues getting Laravel setup feel free to create a github issue here and we can try to help. Stack Overflow and the Laracasts forums are other great resources.

Adding Authentication

We want users to be able to login to our application. Users need a name, email and password. We are not going to cover or include social authentication in our app. To generate Login and Register functionality run the below command:

php artisan make:auth

This will generate a UI and backend components for authentication. Next we must setup the database.

Configure your environment

We are going to use SQLite for the sake of simplicity in this tutorial. Create a new SQLite database with a blank file:

touch database/database.sqlite

Next up, in the .env file change DB_CONNECTION=sqlite and DB_DATABASE to be the absolute path to your database.sqlite file. If you do not know the absolute path you can use:

$ php artisan tinker
Psy Shell v0.8.0 (PHP 5.6.27 — cli) by Justin Hileman
>>> database_path(‘database.sqlite’)
=> “/Users/connorleech/Projects/laravel-5.3-app/database/database.sqlite”

In the end my .env file looks like:

DB_CONNECTION=sqlite
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=/Users/connorleech/Projects/laravel-5.3-app/database/database.sqlite
DB_USERNAME=homestead
DB_PASSWORD=secret

These environment variables are all used in config/database.php so you can view and make changes there. Do not commit your .env file to version control systems such as git. Database config docs.

Once the database is configured create and run the database migrations to get everything setup:

$ php artisan migrate:install
Migration table created successfully.

$ php artisan migrate
Migrated: 2014_10_12_000000_create_users_table
Migrated: 2014_10_12_100000_create_password_resets_table

This creates a Users and Passwords Resets table for our authentication system. Those migration files can be viewed in database/migrations/. If you would like to add fields to the users table and do not have any production data to save you can edit those files directly and then run:

$ php artisan migrate:refresh

We will stick with the defaults. Congratulations! You have set up a web app with authentication and its own database using Laravel 5.3. Head to http://localhost:8000/register in order to create an account.

In order to edit the UI head into the resources/views/ directory. Routes are defined in the routes/ directory, a new location for the 5.3 release. Matt Stauffer has an article here with further information about the change.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this article give it a favorite. Thanks again.

Source code: https://github.com/connor11528/laravel-5.3-app Twitter: https://twitter.com/Connor11528