Laravel Sanctum is one way to authenticate different models to use your application but there are many other ways.

In this article, I'll be explain how to authenticate team/team members with a Laravel Sanctum.

Assume that we have following Model;

class Team extends Model { ... }

If we add Laravel Sanctum's Trait "use HasApiTokens" then we can easily use all API authentication features on Team model too.

class Team extends Model
{
    use HasApiTokens;
}

From now on, we are ready to authenticate Team Model.

Create an API token to use for that Team Model;

$team = Team::query()->find(1);
$token = $team->createToken('debug-token', ['all'])->plainTextToken; // save plain Text token to use later on.

Let's have a create an API route in api.php;

Route::post('authenticate/team', function (Request $request) {
    return $request->user(); // this is going to return the Team not User Model
})->middleware('auth:sanctum');

Be careful about adding 'auth:sanctum' middleware to the route otherwise it will not work.

Now let's have a try it sending a request to this API using Postman; Always include plain text token in the header as a Bearer Token.

Now it's good and we could access to the team.