Laravel Passport VS JWT

Question

I am kind of confused about recognizing the discrepancy between Laravel Passport and tymondesigns/jwt-auth package. Do they actually serve the same purpose of API authentication via tokens? As long as Laravel Passport was introduced in 5.3+, is one supposed to use Passport instead of tymondesigns/jwt-auth package in the latest versions?

Answer 1

The "tymondesigns/jwt-auth" is a PHP Laravel implementation of the JWT protocol. On the other hand, Passport also uses JWT by default plus a huge extra, a complete Oauth2 implementation. Regarding the functionality, as I said they both use JWT thus you can use whichever you like to authentication via tokens. They both do their job and you'll have a secure API tokens implementation.

The difference comes if you would like a lightweight API tokens implementation or the plus of the Oauth2 server to allow more and other apps to communicate with your app. One of the most common cases would be how some random apps ask Google or Facebook for your user information. If you implement the Oauth2 server your app would allow any other app with a proper token to ask for data from your app.

"[...] Laravel makes API authentication a breeze using Laravel Passport, which provides a full OAuth2 server implementation for your Laravel application in a matter of minutes. Passport is built on top of the League OAuth2 server that is maintained by Alex Bilbie." from https://laravel.com/docs/master/passport

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For more details, I have made an explanation of Laravel Passport, JWT, Oauth2, and Auth0.