How to extend Laravel's Auth Guard class?

I'm trying to extend Laravel's Auth Guard class by one additional method, so I'm able to call Auth::myCustomMethod() at the end.

Following the documentation section Extending The Framework I'm stuck on how to exactly do this because the Guard class itself doesn't have an own IoC binding which I could override.

Here is some code demonstrating what I'm trying to do:

namespace Foobar\Extensions\Auth;

class Guard extends \Illuminate\Auth\Guard {

    public function myCustomMethod()
    {
        // ...
    }

}

Now how should I register the extended class Foobar\Extensions\Auth\Guard to be used instead of the original Illuminate\Auth\Guard so I'm able to call Auth::myCustomMethod() the same way as e.g. Auth::check()?

One way would be to replace the Auth alias in the app/config/app.php but I'm not sure if this is really the best way to solve this.

BTW: I'm using Laravel 4.1.

Solution

I would create my own UserProvider service that contain the methods I want and then extend Auth.

I recommend creating your own service provider, or straight up extending the Auth class in one of the start files (eg. start/global.php).

Auth::extend('nonDescriptAuth', function()
{
    return new Guard(
        new NonDescriptUserProvider(),
        App::make('session.store')
    );
});

This is a good tutorial you can follow to get a better understanding

There is another method you could use. It would involve extending one of the current providers such as Eloquent.

class MyProvider extends Illuminate\Auth\EloquentUserProvider {

    public function myCustomMethod()
    {
        // Does something 'Authy'
    }
}

Then you could just extend auth as above but with your custom provider.

\Auth::extend('nonDescriptAuth', function()
{
    return new \Illuminate\Auth\Guard(
        new MyProvider(
            new \Illuminate\Hashing\BcryptHasher,
            \Config::get('auth.model')
        ),
        \App::make('session.store')
    );
});

Once you've implemented the code you would change the driver in the auth.php config file to use 'nonDescriptAuth`.