Laravel Guards: A Mechanism for Multi-Level Access Control

Guards in Laravel provide a powerful and flexible mechanism to implement multi-level access control within your application. They allow you to define how users are authenticated, handle different user roles, and ensure secure access to specific parts of your application based on the user type or context.

This is particularly useful in scenarios where your application has multiple levels of users, such as administrators, editors, and regular users, or in cases of multi-tenancy, where each tenant has its own authentication logic.

How Guards Work in Laravel Guards define how authentication is managed for a given request. By default, Laravel provides two main guards:

Web Guard: Uses session and cookies for stateful authentication, ideal for web applications. API Guard: Utilizes tokens for stateless authentication, often used in API-based applications.