I recently had the need to write a small url shortening application. I am aware that this problem has been solved quite a few times before, but what is being a developer if not reinventing the wheel just for the heck of it? Custom CMS anyone?
Knowing that this was going to be a tiny RESTful API and also knowing that Laravel 5.2 had API rate limiting built in, I was eager to give it a try. Taylor Otwell being Taylor Otwell shipped 5.2 with the rate limiting defaults set up out of the box and I had my application building out short url's in a matter of minutes. The problem for me came when I wanted to start associating those short urls with a user.
Typically my applications have a UI and authentication is done through a simple login page. Obviously for a RESTful API, having a login page isn't ideal. Instead, my hope was to have users append an api_token to the end of their query string and use that to auth
