Laravel Sanctum API Authentication: The Complete Production Guide

There's a quiet assumption baked into almost every Laravel AI integration tutorial: authentication exists. Routes are protected. Tokens are issued. The API is locked down. That assumption breaks the moment you sit down to build something real. Laravel Sanctum is the framework's answer to lightweight API token authentication. It ships with Laravel, it integrates cleanly with Eloquent, and it handles the two most common authentication patterns - SPA cookie-based sessions and mobile/external API token issuance, without pulling in a full OAuth server. This guide covers both patterns, but it leans hard into the personal access token model, because that's what you need when you're building an API that your own frontend, mobile app, or third-party client will consume. By the end, you'll have a production-ready authentication layer: token issuance with ability scoping, protected routes, revocation endpoints, rate limiting via Redis, and a multi-tenant token pattern that holds up under real loa