How to get Bearer token from a request in Laravel
Stefan Izdrail
Founder & Senior Architect · 2026-06-29
Title: Effortlessly Retrieving Bearer Tokens from Request Headers in Laravel
Body: When developing web applications using Laravel, ensuring the security of your data is crucial. Often, you might need to verify JWT (JSON Web Token) authentication tokens that are sent as request headers, such as 'Authorization'. In this blog post, we'll explore how to get a JWT token from an incoming request and handle the verification process effectively in Laravel.
To begin with, let us first define the variables and classes needed for our example:
1. `$request` - The input data provided by the client (through HTTP requests).
2. `$token` - The Bearer token retrieved from a request header.
3. We will also create a class called 'TokenManager' which will be responsible for handling and validating JWT tokens.
Now, let us examine how we can get the Bearer token from an HTTP request in Laravel:
Step 1: Retrieve the Bearer token from the request header using `$request->header('Authorization')`. This method will return a string containing the entire authorization header. However, this approach includes the prefix 'Bearer:' along with the actual token. If you wish to remove that prefix and deal only with the JWT token, continue on to step 2.
Step 2: To achieve this, we can split the extracted header string into two parts - one containing the 'Bearer:' prefix and the other including the token itself. You could do so by splitting it with a space character, starting from the second index (e.g., `$token_parts = explode(' ', $request->header('Authorization'), 2);`). This will separate your input as follows:
```
$token_parts => Array(
0 => "Bearer:",
1 => "eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJSUzI1NiJ9.eyJpc3MiOiJleGFtcGxlLm9yZyIsImF1ZCI6ImV4YW1wbGUuY29tIiwiaWF0IjoxMzU2OTk5NTI0LCJuYmYiOjEzNTcwMDAwMDB9.UQUJV7KmNWPiwiVFAqr4Kx6O6yd69lfbtyWF8qa8iMN2dpZZ1t6xaF8HUmY46y9pZN76f5UMGA0p_CMqymRdYfNiKsiTd2V_3Qpt9LObaLg6rq18j3GLHfdr8nyBzO3v7gTpmNaU6Xy47aMDsbcs593Lx_lD3PnO41oEHgih7CsRKW1WcW1radnpEhdDO7-GpmGOF6xUnpAlQ9EHqpqnIlZPbVoJg92Iwozn-07uuWrkyKUpYN4IPpstd1ks3cKlJ6FH-2ROiC4N0MVLxp4lhUyKhLdwgDWYH4tjtdrEVK0a3_zVtK1ukvriEJqMkfYHnE6Bwv_pv_-lRNy_y7m-YQ"
)
```
So, the $token variable after this step will only contain the JWT token. This avoids having to deal with unnecessary information during the token validation process.
Step 3: Create a TokenManager class that will handle the verification of the retrieved token. In the constructor or within your controller's code, you can load the required dependencies (e.g., JWTAuth, JWT, JWB) and initialize them as needed. Then, add a validation method to verify the authenticity and integrity of the retrieved JWT token:
```php
public function validateToken($token) {
try {
$payload = JWT::decode($token, app('laravel-passport')->getJWTKeyName());
// Additional validation or processing logic can be added here.
return true;
} catch (\Exception $e) {
return false;
}
}
```
In the above example, we use JWT::decode() to decode the token with the correct secret key and validate its authenticity. If the validation is successful, return true, otherwise, false.
By implementing these steps, you can efficiently retrieve a Bearer token from incoming requests in Laravel while ensuring proper authentication mechanisms are employed. This approach allows for a more streamlined and secure development process.