Sanctum Tokens Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Build vs. buy for an admin-facing token workflow. Sanctum ships the token engine but no UI. Any Nova-based back office eventually gets a "create an API token for this customer/integration" request from Support, Solutions Engineering, or Partnerships. This package is a candidate answer to that request instead of a ticket against the platform team.
• Where token issuance lives in the product. It forces the decision of whether tokens are minted by end users in your app (self-service, Jetstream/Fortify-style), by internal staff in the admin panel (this package's model), or by a machine-to-machine provisioning flow. Each has different UX, audit, and support-load consequences.
• Support and onboarding toil reduction. Lets a non-engineer issue a token through the admin UI rather than asking an engineer to run tinker or a one-off artisan command — a measurable reduction in escalations and lead time for customer integrations.
• RBAC and auditability positioning. Issuance inside Nova reuses existing Nova authorization policies and leaves an admin-panel record, which is a materially better compliance story than ad-hoc CLI token creation.
• Roadmap input, not roadmap commitment. With zero stars and zero dependents, treat the package as a reference implementation of the pattern. Its real product value is validating that the gap exists and showing roughly how small the surface is — useful when scoping an in-house equivalent.
• Use cases it plausibly serves: issuing tokens to customer-owned integrations, standing up service accounts for internal tools, temporary tokens for a support debugging session, and demo/sandbox provisioning in a sales environment.

When to Consider This Package

Adopt (or, more likely, fork) when:

• You are already running Laravel Nova — the package is worthless without it, and Nova is a paid, per-project license, so this is a hard gate.
• You need a thin internal admin action, not a customer-facing token management experience.
• Your token requirements are simple: create, view, revoke, maybe set abilities/expiry. No rotation policy engine, no approval workflow.
• You can accept vendor risk: single maintainer, no stars, no dependents, no downstream users to inherit bug reports. Budget for vendoring the source into your repo and owning it.
• You have capacity for a security review before it touches production — token creation is a privileged operation and the blast radius of a bug is high.

Look elsewhere (or build) when:

• You do not use Nova. Use a plain Filament/Livewire admin screen, a small custom controller, or nothing at all.
• You need end-user self-service token management. That is an application feature (Sanctum + your own UI, or Jetstream/Fortify), not an admin-panel add-on.
• You need governance features: expiry enforcement, automatic rotation, scoped abilities per plan tier, approval chains, immutable audit logs. This package does not credibly claim that territory.
• You need OAuth2 / third-party delegated authorization — that is Passport, a different problem.
• You need multi-tenant isolation guarantees around token visibility. Verify before trusting; do not assume.
• Your security posture forbids unvetted third-party code in a privileged path — which, for most companies above a certain size, is the default answer here.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

To executives: We have a recurring, low-grade operational cost: engineers manually mint API tokens for customers and internal integrations, and those tokens are created outside our admin tooling with no consistent record of who issued what. This package closes that gap cheaply — it puts token creation and revocation inside Nova, behind the permissions we already enforce. The catch is maturity: it is a zero-adoption, single-maintainer package, so I do not recommend taking it as a dependency. I recommend we vendor a copy or reimplement the ~small surface it covers and own it, which costs a fraction of a sprint and gives us the audit trail and the control.

To engineering: Sanctum gives us tokens but no admin surface; this fills it. Read it as a spec, not a dependency. Confirm: (1) which Sanctum abilities/expiry fields it exposes, (2) whether it respects Nova policies and per-model scoping, (3) whether token plaintext is shown once and never persisted, (4) what it writes to logs. Then decide fork vs. 200-line Nova Resource of our own.

Bottom line for the decision log: the problem is real and worth solving this quarter; the package is a low-risk way to see the shape of the solution and a high-risk thing to depend on. Score it as inspiration, fund it as internal work.