Most interactive applications have the ability for users to login and logout. Laravel provides a simple class to help you validate user credentials and retrieve information about the current user of your application.
To get started, let's look over the application/config/auth.php file. The authentication configuration contains some basic options to help you get started with authentication.
Laravel's authentication is driver based, meaning the responsibility for retrieving users during authentication is delegated to various "drivers". Two are included out of the box: Eloquent and Fluent, but you are free to write your own drivers if needed!
The Eloquent driver uses the Eloquent ORM to load the users of your application, and is the default authentication driver. The Fluent driver uses the fluent query builder to load your users.
The second option in the configuration file determines the default "username" of your users. This will typically correspond to a database column in your "users" table, and will usually be "email" or "username".
When using the Eloquent authentication driver, this option determines the Eloquent model that should be used when loading users.
When using the Fluent authentication drivers, this option determines the database table containing the users of your application.