README

Per-client default scopes and standard insufficient_scope responses for Laravel Passport client credentials tokens. Grant a service its scopes once, on the server, and stop maintaining the same list in every client's .env.

A weld.ist project.

Unofficial. Not affiliated with Laravel.

The Problem

Passport lets you restrict what a client may receive through the oauth_clients.scopes column, but that list is only a ceiling. A client credentials token carries exactly the scopes the client asks for:

POST /oauth/token  grant_type=client_credentials             → token with no scopes → every scoped route answers 403
POST /oauth/token  grant_type=client_credentials  scope=...  → token with the requested scopes

So every machine client has to keep a copy of its own permission list and send it on each token request. Every time the server grants a new scope, each client needs a config change and a redeploy. Asking for * doesn't help either: once the client's scopes column is set, * is not in it and gets filtered out.

Passport's token response doesn't include the scope field either, so a client can't tell which scopes it was actually issued.

When a scope is missing, Passport answers with a generic 403. A client cannot tell it apart from any other authorization failure, so it cannot react, for example by fetching a fresh token. A missing or invalid token gets a 401 without the WWW-Authenticate header that RFC 6750 §3 requires.

A client whose scopes column is null is not restricted at all: it receives any scope it asks for.

The Solution

This package welds the missing pieces onto Passport:

Default scopes per client. A client credentials request without a scope parameter receives every scope granted to the client in oauth_clients.scopes. RFC 6749 §3.3 explicitly allows this pre-defined default, and it's how Auth0, GitHub App installation tokens, Microsoft Entra (/.default) and Keycloak behave.
Issued scopes in the token response. The response includes the scope field, so the client knows what it received without inspecting the token.
insufficient_scope responses. A token without a required scope receives the RFC 6750 §3.1 challenge, so clients can tell exactly which scope is missing:

HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
WWW-Authenticate: Bearer error="insufficient_scope", scope="venues:create"

{"message": "Insufficient scope: venues:create"}

Authentication challenges. A request rejected by Passport for a missing token receives WWW-Authenticate: Bearer; an invalid or expired token receives WWW-Authenticate: Bearer error="invalid_token".
Unconfigured clients receive nothing. A client credentials client whose scopes column is null receives no scopes, requested or not, until you fill its column.

A client that does send scope still gets the narrower token it asked for. Other grant types are unaffected.

Requirements

PHP ^8.4
laravel/passport ^13.0

Installation

composer require weldist/laravel-passport-client-scopes

The service provider is auto-discovered — no manual registration.

Setup

Passport's default oauth_clients migration has no scopes column. If your table doesn't have one yet, publish and run this package's migration:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=passport-client-scopes-migrations
php artisan migrate

Then grant scopes to a client:

use Laravel\Passport\ClientRepository;

$client = app(ClientRepository::class)->createClientCredentialsGrantClient('Billing Service');

$client->forceFill(['scopes' => ['invoices:read', 'invoices:create']])->save();

The client now requests a token without any scope and receives both.

Warning

Clients that existed before you installed the package have a null scopes column and receive no scopes from now on. Fill the column of every client credentials client before you deploy.

Configuration

Publish the config file to change the defaults:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=passport-client-scopes-config

Key	Default	Effect
`allow_unconfigured_clients`	`false`	`true` restores Passport's behavior for a `null` column: the client receives any scope it requests.
`authentication_challenge`	`true`	`false` leaves `401` responses without the `WWW-Authenticate` header.

How It Works

`oauth_clients.scopes`	Token request without `scope`	Token request with `scope`
`null`	no scopes	no scopes (any requested scope with `allow_unconfigured_clients`)
`[]`	no scopes	no scopes
`["a", "b"]`	`a b`	requested scopes that are in the list

Scopes in the column that aren't defined with Passport::tokensCan() are dropped.
The null rule applies to client credentials tokens only. Authorization code, password and other grants keep Passport's behavior.
The token response always carries the issued scopes in its scope field, as RFC 6749 §5.1 requires whenever they differ from the requested ones. Clients should read their scopes from there and treat the access token itself as opaque (RFC 9068 §6).

{"scope": "invoices:read invoices:create", "token_type": "Bearer", "expires_in": 31536000, "access_token": "..."}

Minimal override

ScopeRepository extends Passport's Bridge\ScopeRepository and overrides only finalizeScopes(): for a client_credentials grant it returns no scopes when the client's column is null, substitutes the client's granted scopes when nothing was requested, then hands over to Passport's own filtering.
BearerTokenResponse extends league's BearerTokenResponse and only adds the scope field. It is installed through Passport::$authorizationServerResponseType unless your application already set its own response type; in that case add the scope field there.
MissingScopeException is mapped to an HttpException carrying the WWW-Authenticate header; the rest of your exception rendering stays as it is.
AuthenticationChallenge is a global middleware that adds the header to a 401 response when the exception behind it comes from Passport's middleware or a guard with the passport driver. Your own rendering of AuthenticationException stays in place, and a WWW-Authenticate header you set yourself is kept.

Testing

# Build first (once per PHP version)
DOCKER_BUILDKIT=0 docker compose --profile php84 build

# Run tests
docker compose --profile php84 up --abort-on-container-exit --exit-code-from php84   # PHP 8.4
docker compose --profile php85 up --abort-on-container-exit --exit-code-from php85   # PHP 8.5

# Run a single test class or method
docker compose --profile php84 run --rm php84 vendor/bin/phpunit --filter DefaultScopesTest

CI runs PHP 8.4–8.5 via .github/workflows/tests.yml.

License

This package is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license.

weldist / laravel-passport-client-scopes

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