What does laravel means by drivers in its authentication module?

Question

1)Laravel has a very good built in authentication system/module.I had read its documentation the confusion to me is what is definition of a driver in guard and provider?

2)Is defining a new guard means defining a new driver?

Answer 1

In the configuration defining a new Guard is defining a coupling of a driver and a provider. In the default setup the Guard web is the session driver and the users provider used together. The driver is the means of actually figuring out the user from a request and the provider is the interface to the records, in simplest terms.

At the class level a Guard is what the configuration refers to as a Driver.

namespace Illuminate\Auth;

class TokenGuard implements Guard

is the token driver in the api guard in the config.

namespace Illuminate\Auth;

class SessionGuard implement StatefulGuard, ...

is the session driver in the web guard.

'guards' => [
    'web' => [
        'driver' => 'session',
        'provider' => 'users',
    ],

    'api' => [
        'driver' => 'token',
        'provider' => 'users',
        'hash' => false,
    ],
],