Level 80
@mjk22071998 You don’t “log out” of an API. If you want to “log out” a user from a native application then invalidate or revoke their active token.
1 like
Feb 25, 2025
6
Level 1
Laravel Sanctum: Best Practices for Logout in Mobile Apps
Hello Laravel experts,
I hope you are all doing well. I am using Laravel Sanctum for authentication while working on the backend of a mobile application. However, I am facing an issue with the logout route. I have applied the auth:sanctum middleware to it, but on the mobile application side, there are some issues where the token either gets changed or is deleted from shared preferences, making it difficult to call the logout API.
What are the best practices in this scenario? Should the token management be handled on the mobile application side, or would it be better to remove the auth:sanctum middleware from the logout route? I would appreciate any insights or recommendations.
Thank you!
Level 1
@martinbean That is what I am doing, revoking the tokens but sometimes due to some internet issues or some anomalies tokens get lost on mobile devices, and as the logout route is protected by auth:sanctum middleware an authenticated user cannot call that API they get the unauthenticated exception. So, should I handle anomalies and this behavior in the mobile app or just remove auth:sanctum middleware from logout route. I am asking what best practices says here
Level 75
Level 1
@jlrdw I am sorry but I know how to revoke. again, right now I am handling the anomalous behavior where the auth token gets lost at the mobile application then the logout API returns an unauthenticated exception because the logout route is protected by auth:sanctum middleware. So, Now I am asking, What are best practices here whether to handle anomalies at mobile app or just remove the auth:sanctum middleware?
Level 80
@mjk22071998 If the token is “lost” then the user is no longer authenticated, so send them back to through the authentication flow to get a fresh token.
1 like
Level 75
@mjk22071998 I don't even know what that means:
where the auth token gets lost
It's deleted, you issue a new token when their credentials are validated again.
Reference:
https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/sanctum#issuing-mobile-api-tokens
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