JWT User Authentication with Lumen API

Ben Lobaugh
5 min readDec 21, 2020
Photo by Luis Tosta on Unsplash

Lumen is a great framework to build an API off of, but it does not come with user authentication or authorization. I needed to create a small API that allowed users to create an account and access the service with a JWT. Quality information on how to pull that off with Lumen is not very well available- this article will provide a single reference point on building a simple user authentication and authorization system with JWTs on Lumen.

In this article I will teach you how to set up user authentication and authorization in Lumen. I will not teach you what Lumen or JWT is. I am going to assume you know what a they are or you would not be reading this article.

If you are following along, the prerequisite for what follows is:

  • Running Lumen project

To see the complete code from this article, visit https://github.com/blobaugh/lumen-api-jwt-auth-example

This example includes a docker-compose.yml file that will get you up and running quickly.

For the JWT portion, we will be utilizing the excellent library from https://github.com/tymondesigns/jwt-auth

Install the JWT Library

We will be utilizing the JWT library by Sean Tymon. The library is installable as a composer package, and can be…

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Ben Lobaugh
Ben Lobaugh

Written by Ben Lobaugh

Director of Engineering at Mindsize. 20+ year technology veteran. Providing leadership insights, mentorship, and coaching to new and existing leaders.

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