Laravel : JWT Auth access auth()->user() return null

I am trying to use JWT for API authentication I am building, I have managed to get the JWT token with code like the following:

$user = User::select('id_user', DB::raw('AES_DECRYPT(id_user, "nur") as username'))
    ->where('id_user', DB::raw('AES_ENCRYPT("' . $credentials['username'] . '", "...")'))
    ->where('password', DB::raw('AES_ENCRYPT("' . $credentials['password'] . '", "...")'))
    ->first();

if (!$user) {
    return response()->json(['error' => 'Unauthorized'], 401);

}

$token = auth()->login($user);
if (!$token) {
    auth()->setUser($user);
    return response()->json(['error' => 'Unauthorized'], 401);
}

return $this->respondWithToken($token);

but when you get a logged in user with the auth()->user() function it doesn't return anything,

public function me( )
{
    return response()->json(auth()->user());
}

my return

{}

this is my routes

Route::group(['middleware' => 'api', 'prefix' => 'auth'], function ($router) {
    Route::post('login', [AuthController::class, 'login']);
    Route::post('logout', [AuthController::class, 'logout']);
    Route::post('refresh', [AuthController::class, 'refresh']);
    Route::post('me', [AuthController::class, 'me']);
});

and my config/auth.php file

    'defaults' => [
        'guard' => 'api',
        'passwords' => 'users',
    ],

    'guards' => [
        // 'web' => [
        //     'driver' => 'session',
        //     'provider' => 'users',
        // ],
        'api' => [
            'driver' => 'jwt',
            'provider' => 'users',
        ],
    ],

    'providers' => [
        'users' => [
            'driver' => 'eloquent',
            'model' => App\Models\User::class,
        ],

        // 'users' => [
        //     'driver' => 'database',
        //     'table' => 'users',
        // ],
    ],

the code that I wrote based on the tutorial from this link

I did testing using postman, and the command set the environment automatically. My testing flow is as follows.

1. login,
2. if the token comes out I immediately run the test to run the me() function

i think i got the solution for this problem i am facing. where jwt-auth on laravel reads saves the id of our user into the sub in the payload that we created.

and from this comment I thought, what if we make our own custom payload for jwt. here is the code i use.

$payloadable = [
    "sub" => $user->username,
];

$token = auth()->claims($payloadable)->login($user);

with that code we create a sub to store my user id.

$payload = auth()->payload()->toArray();
$pegawai = Pegawai::select('pegawai.nama', 'pegawai.jbtn')
    ->where('pegawai.nik', $payload['sub'])
    ->first();

it does look inefficient, but at least it can be useful for me to save the original value of the id_user that I have encrypted with AES_ENCRYPT.

from the first code I made my encrypted data to be decrypted and stored as a username column, and the original value (the result of decryption) I saved in the paylod, in this way I can still get user data while still using AES_DENCRYPT and AES_ENCRYPT when querying the database, because in the payload that I have contains the original value of my data.

> I don't know why, however, data encrypted with AES_ENCRYPT when returned as json in Laravel returns a value of 0.

I hope that describes and helps

Did you added this code in your controller?

public function __construct()
{
  $this->middleware('auth:api', ['except' => ['login']]);
}