Manually Authenticating Users In Laravel 5.1

Manually Authenticating Users In Laravel 5.1:

Of course, you are not required to use the authentication controllers included with Laravel. If you choose to remove these controllers, you will need to manage user authentication using the Laravel authentication classes directly.

We will access Laravel's authentication services via the Auth facade, so we'll need to make sure to import the Auth facade at the top of the class. Next, let's check out the attempt method:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Auth;
use Illuminate\Routing\Controller;

class AuthController extends Controller
{
    /**
     * Handle an authentication attempt.
     *
     * @return Response
     */
    public function authenticate()
    {
        if (Auth::attempt(['email' => $email, 'password' => $password])) {
            // Authentication passed...
            return redirect()->intended('dashboard');
        }
    }
}

The attempt method accepts an array of key / value pairs as its first argument. The values in the array will be used to find the user in your database table. So, in the example above, the user will be retrieved by the value of the email column. If the user is found, the hashed password stored in the database will be compared with the hashed password value passed to the method via the array. If the two hashed passwords match an authenticated session will be started for the user.

The attempt method will return true if authentication was successful. Otherwise, false will be returned.

The intended method on the re director will redirect the user to the URL they were attempting to access before being caught by the authentication filter. A fallback URI may be given to this method in case the intended destination is not available.

If you wish, you also may add extra conditions to the authentication query in addition to the user's e-mail and password. For example, we may verify that user is marked as "active":

if (Auth::attempt(['email' => $email, 'password' => $password, 'active' => 1])) {
    // The user is active, not suspended, and exists.
}
To log users out of your application, you may use the logout method on the Auth facade. This will clear the authentication information in the user's session:

Auth::logout();

Note: In these examples, email is not a required option, it is merely used as an example. You should use whatever column name corresponds to a "username" in your database.

Thanks.