Setting the default guard on a route group

Question

I have set up an API token for my users which they can optionally provide when accessing API routes for additional data to be returned.

This is my auth.php configuration:

'defaults' => [
    'guard' => 'web',      
],    
'guards' => [
    'web' => [
        'driver' => 'session',
        'provider' => 'eloquent',
    ],

    'api' => [
        'driver' => 'token',
        'provider' => 'eloquent',
    ],
],

I have various (shared) places in my code which use checks like $request->user() without providing the guard. The problem is that this always uses the default guard.

However if I set one of the API routes as to use middleware auth:api then it uses the api guard by default as I'd expect. I can't really set that up though because as I mentioned, authentication is optional and using the auth middleware makes it mandatory.

I'm wondering if there's a way to set all API routes such that their default guard is the API guard.

Answer 1

For me the easiest was to add to the Api\Controller (The one that extends all your classes), the following line:

public function __construct()
{
    // We set the guard api as default driver
    auth()->setDefaultDriver('api');
}