Laravel package review: Sentry - authentication & authorization system

Brief view

Cartalyst/Sentry is one of the best packages for Laravel 4 (not only), that provides authentication and authorization features. Besides authentication and authorization, Sentry provides group management, permission control, registration, custom hashing and additional security features. You can read full documentation on official Cartalyst page: https://cartalyst.com/manual/sentry

Requirements

• PHP 5.3+

Supports

• Laravel 4+
• Code Igniter 3.0-dev
• Fuel PHP 1.x
• Native PHP

Review

First of all, Sentry is really easy to install package. Using Composer your authentication/authorization system will be ready to use in minutes, you just need to add "cartalyst/sentry": "2.1.*" string to your composer.json require array and run composer update.
After installation you will need to configure app.php laravel config, to register provider and its alias, run migrations and publish Sentry config. More detailed documentation you can view on the official Cartalyst page.
Its really easy to work with Sentry. All errors are thrown as an exceptions, and you can easily handle them. As an example, i will show you registration code:

try
{
    // Let's register a user.
    $user = Sentry::register(array(
        'email'    => 'john.doe@example.com',
        'password' => 'test',
    ));

    // Let's get the activation code
    $activationCode = $user->getActivationCode();

    // Send activation code to the user so he can activate the account

}
catch (Cartalyst\Sentry\Users\LoginRequiredException $e)
{
    echo 'Login field is required.';
}
catch (Cartalyst\Sentry\Users\PasswordRequiredException $e)
{
    echo 'Password field is required.';
}
catch (Cartalyst\Sentry\Users\UserExistsException $e)
{
    echo 'User with this login already exists.';
}

As you can see, this code is really straight forward. All other functions of Sentry works the same. Code is clear and follows FIG standarts. As for me, I was able to integrate this package with my own social authentication module, because of high customization level of Sentry.
Despite all advantages, I actually had one problem. Sentry has its own social authentication package (Sentry-social), which can work together with Cartalyst. Sad, but I was unable to configure latest version of Sentry with Sentry-social because of some errors. Moreover, i was even unable to find on github source codes of Sentry-social.

Conclusion

As for me, this is one of the best authentication/authorization packages I have ever worked with, not only on Laravel, but on Kohana and Code Igniter too. I strongly recommend you to try it out despite working on your own authorization system.