How to use Laravel’s default user table for Twill CMS authentication.

Out of the box, Twill comes with its own user's table twill_users and uses it for logging in to Twill CMS. I recently was trying to find a quick answer to this in the Twill docs and had no luck. So I did a quick google search for **“twill edit laravel users”** and it returned some outdated questions on Google of a few people with this question. I needed Twill to use the standard user's table that ships with all Laravel apps. The docs don’t explain how to achieve this clearly enough (see where in docs here), though it's quite easy. There are only two steps to make it work.

Step 1: Modify your Laravel provided user migration schema. The table needs to include the required Twill fields.

Schema::create('users', function (Blueprint $table) {

// Comment these two lines out
// $table->id(); // Twill's method creates 
// $table->timestamps(); // Twill's method creates

// Add these two
// this will create an id, a "published" column, and soft delete and // timestamps columns
createDefaultTableFields($table); 
$table->string('role', 100); 

// Modify password to look like so:
$table->string('password', 60)->nullable()->default(null);

$table->string('name');
$table->string('email')->unique();
$table->timestamp('email_verified_at')->nullable();
$table->rememberToken();

});

If you reference Twill’s GitHub repo you can see the standard twill_users migration. This is how to figure out what columns are required by Twill.

[embed]twill/2020_02_09_000001_create_twill_default_users_tables.php at 2.x · area17/twill This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below…github.com

Step 2: Set the user table in twill config. Alongside any other customizations you’ve made, add in the user's table set to users this will tell Twill to use that table. It will also no longer run the migration to create the twill_users table.

return [

'users_table' => 'users',

];

Now just php artisan migrate:fresh and add your twill super admin using php artisan twill:superadmin then you should be able to log in using standard Laravel users, and access other dashboards running on the standard Laravel auth like Laravel Jetstream, Laravel Nova, etc.

You can see that Twill uses a config setting to determine the user table here: https://github.com/area17/twill/blob/2.x/src/Models/User.php#L60

Thank you to AREA 17 Twill is an awesome CMS with a lot of flexibility. I’m still digging into it but I’m really enjoying what your team has made so far!