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I don’t understand why Material UI has become so popular. Today at work, I was doing some research on Vue UI Libraries and the majority of the ones I found were implementing it.

In my opinion it is actually not very pleasing to use but maybe that is just because it so heavily used by all of Google’s app and I so strongly dislike Google after all of the privacy issues that have come out.

After reading this post from Mike Crittenden on experimenting on myself, I decided to run my own experiment this past week.

I asked my boss if it would be ok if I started work at 7am instead of my usually 8am and then take an extra hour off for lunch. This gave me an hour and I half off for lunch and it was super nice! Not only did it give me a break from siting at a desk all day but it also gave me a chance to get a few things done.

I'm going to talk to my boss and if he is ok with it, I think I'm going to make this my new schedule.

Something interesting happened the other day. I was going through the Chick-fil-a drive-through and there had two lanes. One of the lines had a significant line while the other one had no cars in it. The way it wraps around the building, I could not tell if their where people working both lanes or just the one. And so I wondered, is this second lane open, and if so, why were was no one in that lane. It took me a moment to try to decide what line I should enter.

It was fascinating, because I chose to enter the line of cars in lane one as opposed to taking the risk of entering lane two and it turning out to be closed. I later approached the area where you place you order and realized both lanes were in fact open. Yet, in fear that I would end up in a lane that was closed, I opted to join the long line and play it safe.

Just and interesting observation. I'm sure their have been plenty of people that have studied this.

In an application I was working on today, I had to migrate from Laravel token authentication to Sanctum. The process went relatively smoothly but just in case someone else has trouble, I thought I would layout the migration process.

Installing Sanctum

I’m going to direct you to the official documentation for instructions on installing Sanctum. It’s very straight forward and should be easy for anyone follow.

Migrating Api Keys

In this application, we had a ApiUser model to distinguish between regular users and other applications that talk to our api. While Sanctum uses a second table to store the access tokens (personal_access_tokens), with the Laravel token authentication guard, we were storing the token directly on the ApiUser model itself. We did not want to invalidate all of the api keys we already had in the database so migrating them all over to Sanctum’s personal_access_tokens table was essential.

Following the documentation, I added the HasApiTokens trait to the model I was going to be associating the tokens with. This provides all of the necessary methods and relationships in order to both create tokens for the model and to authenticate the incoming request against the model.

To migrate the tokens from the old table to the new one was a little bit tricky and I had to do some digging in the source code of Sanctum in order to come up with a solution. You see, we were storing our tokens in plain text in the database, but Sanctum hashes the token before storing them. This meant it was not just as simple as coping the tokens from one table to the next.

I first tried using the createToken() method the HasApiTokens trait provides. The problem with this is was, it generates the token for you and does not allow you to actually specify you own string to use as the token (which is what I needed to do in order to migrate the old tokens over).

I was able to dive into the source code for createToken() and realized all it was doing was creating a PersonalAccessToken with a randomly generated string and saving it to the model. I copied and pasted this function and with a little modification, was able to create this migration that would work.

return new class extends Migration
{
    public function up()
    {
        ApiUser::all()->each(function (ApiUser $apiUser) {
            $plainTextToken = $apiUser->api_token;

            $apiUser->tokens()->create([
                ‘name’ => ‘Migrated Token’,
                ‘token’ => hash(‘sha256’, $plainTextToken),
                ‘abilities’ => [‘*’],
                ‘expires_at’ => null,
            ]);
        });
    }
};

Changing the Authentication Middleware

I had to then instruct Laravel to use Sanctum as opposed to the token guard for authentication to our api. I did a search for ->middleware([‘auth:api’]) and replaced all instances of auth:api with auth:sanctum.

Updating Tests

With the all of the tokens successfully migrated over to the personal_access_tokens table and our api.php routes file updated to use the new middleware, the last thing to do was to update all of our tests that were manually passing a bearer token in the authorization header with every request to using this snippet that I found and modified from the documentation: Sanctum::actingAs(ApiUser::factory()->create(), [‘*’]);.

Conclusion

In conclusion, migrating to Laravel Sanctum is not as hard as I expect it would be. It’s fairly straight forward with the hardest part being the migration of old api tokens.

I hope this article will be helpful to you as a guide for the process of migrating to Sanctum.