Laravel keeps passing GenericUser to Policies instead of my User Model - php

Question

I am trying to use the standard Laravel auth related functionality. I have the standard login, register, logout, etc... working fine. But my problem is that whenever I go to use functions like Auth::user() this is returning the GenericUser model rather than my own App/Models/User.php model. The problem is that my User's model has some foreign key references to other data so I would like to work exclusively with my User model.
For example, when trying to make a Policy I am running into an error:
Argument 1 passed to App\Policies\ContractPolicy::before() must be an
instance of App\Models\User, instance of Illuminate\Auth\GenericUser
given
And the code simply looks like this:
<?php
namespace App\Policies;
use App\Models\Contract;
use App\Models\User;
use Illuminate\Auth\Access\HandlesAuthorization;
class ContractPolicy
{
use HandlesAuthorization;
public function before(User $user, $ability)
{
if ($user->isSuperAdmin()) {
return true;
}
}
public function viewAny(User $user)
{
return $user->isMember();
}
}
The GenericUser model is indeed returning the data from the users table, but the problem is that it is completely different from what my User model gives, and thus includes nothing like the foreign key references or functions I added. I was under the impression that I could switch the model used by switching the config/auth.php provider. Which I did and nothing seemed to change:
'providers' => [
'users' => [
'model' => App\Models\User::class,
],
'users' => [
'driver' => 'database',
'table' => 'users',
],
],
What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

You are defining the users provider to use the 'database' driver:
'users' => [
'driver' => 'database',
'table' => 'users',
],
Adjust that to use the 'eloquent' driver instead:
'users' => [
'driver' => 'eloquent',
'model' => App\Models\User::class,
],
The 'database' driver uses Query Builder to interact with the database table and returns an object of GenericUser to represent the currently authenticated user.
The 'eloquent' driver uses an Eloquent Model to interact with the database and returns a Model instance. If you like relationships and all the other features of Eloquent then you should stick with using the 'eloquent' driver. Also, you have defined your Policy methods to be expecting a particular Model passed to its methods.