Laravel: Persistent Authentication Issues on Page Refresh in Production

Below is one possibility: the production authentication cookie isn’t being shared between your API subdomain (api.example.com) and your site’s domain (example.com). Locally you might have everything running on a single host, but in production your cookie’s domain (or even path) might not be accessible or sent when refreshing the page.

Here are some points to check and adjust:

1. Cookie Domain and Session Configuration

Make sure that in your Laravel project you’re setting the proper cookie domain in your session configuration so that cookies can be accessed on both subdomains. In your config/session.php file, change:

PHPCopied
'domain' => env('SESSION_DOMAIN', null),

to something like:

PHPCopied
'domain' => '.example.com',

Similarly, in your Sanctum config file (config/sanctum.php), add your stateful domains:

PHPCopied
'stateful' => explode(',', env('SANCTUM_STATEFUL_DOMAINS', 'example.com,api.example.com')),

And then ensure your environment (.env) file has:

SESSION_DOMAIN=.example.com
SANCTUM_STATEFUL_DOMAINS=example.com,api.example.com

This way the authentication token in the cookie will be available to both your main domain and your subdomain.

2. HTTPS and Secure Cookie Settings

If you are using HTTPS in production (which you should), verify that your cookies are flagged as secure in config/session.php:

PHPCopied
'secure' => env('SESSION_SECURE_COOKIE', true),

And ensure your HTTPS certificate and configuration are correctly set on both domains.

3. Serving the Nuxt Files via Laravel Route

When you use the controller to serve your index.html via file_get_contents, double-check that you are not unintentionally stripping or ignoring cookies. Serving a static file like this bypasses many of Laravel’s built-in middleware. Typically, you would use Laravel’s Response object so headers are set appropriately. For example:

PHPCopied
public function show()
{
    return response()->file(public_path('index.html'));
}

This way you get defaults from Laravel that might be important for cookies and caching.

4. Confirm Your Client-Side Setup

Ensure that on the client side your HTTP client (Axios, for example) is sending credentials (withCredentials: true) when making API requests. This ensures that cookies are sent with each request:

JSCopied
axios.defaults.withCredentials = true;

Summary

The main issue is likely that the authentication cookie from Sanctum is set with a domain that does not cover both your production domains (example.com and api.example.com) or that your requests aren’t carrying the cookie because of cross-site configurations. Adjust your cookie domain, session settings, and client-side configuration accordingly to resolve the logout after refresh issue.