Jwt Key Mgmt Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Auth and API strategy. Informs whether you ship JWT-based access tokens, service-to-service credentials, or signed webhooks — and whether you sign asymmetrically (RS256/ES256/EdDSA) rather than with shared secrets.
• Build vs. buy on key infrastructure. JWK parsing, key generation, kid-based selection, and rotation are commodity but security-critical. This is the "adopt" option for the JWK layer; building it in-house is hard to justify.
• Roadmap enabler: key rotation and multi-tenant signing. A JWKS endpoint backed by a key set lets you rotate signing keys without downtime and issue per-tenant keys — a common prerequisite in enterprise and SOC 2 conversations.
• Feature tickets it unblocks: publishing /.well-known/jwks.json, accepting tokens from multiple issuers, migrating legacy HS256 tokens to asymmetric keys, evaluating Ed25519.
• Scope reality check for planning. It is one component (key management), not a complete JWT library. Budget for sibling signature/encryption components plus a thin Laravel integration layer.

When to Consider This Package

Consider it when:

• You must produce or consume JWK / JWKSet structures per RFC 7517/7518, or expose a JWKS endpoint.
• You need key selection by kid/algorithm from a set, plus rotation with overlapping validity windows.
• You need multiple key types — RSA, EC, OKP (Ed25519), oct — behind one abstraction.
• You are already using (or evaluating) web-token/jwt-framework, or need control that higher-level packages hide.

Look elsewhere when:

• You want Laravel-native ergonomics (service provider, publishable config, guards) — Sanctum, Passport, or tymon/jwt-auth fit better.
• You only need opaque API tokens or a single shared-secret JWT.
• You need a full OIDC/OAuth2 authorization server, or enterprise KMS/HSM-backed custody (AWS KMS, Vault, Cloudflare).
• You cannot absorb integration work: there are no Laravel bindings here, and this is a read-only split repo — docs, issues, and releases live in the parent monorepo. Vet that project's maintenance cadence and pin versions.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

To executives: "We need to sign and verify tokens. Instead of writing crypto and key rotation ourselves, we adopt a small, MIT-licensed, standards-compliant component. It reduces security and audit risk and avoids a multi-week build — but it is a building block, so plan roughly one to two weeks of integration, tests, and key-custody design. It also unlocks key rotation and multi-tenant signing, which enterprise buyers ask about."

To engineering: "Spec-compliant JWK/JWKS handling: parsing, generation, kid-based selection, rotation, and multi-algorithm support, composable with the rest of the JWT Framework. Caveats: no Laravel service provider, the split repo's star count understates real adoption, and it does not encode or decode tokens by itself. Proposal: spike it behind a KeyRepository interface, wrap it in our own service provider, keep private keys in a secret manager, and pin the minor version."