Filament at Scale: Multi-Panel Auth, Custom Panels, and Table Query Tuning

Filament at Scale: Multi-Panel Auth, Custom Panels, and Table Query Tuning

Filament v3/v4 ships with a clean panel-per-provider model, but most tutorials stop at a single AdminPanelProvider. Production SaaS apps routinely need an admin panel, a tenant panel, and a public-facing portal — each with its own auth guard, middleware stack, and URL prefix. Add a table that pages through 500 k rows and you have a real engineering problem.

This article covers both concerns with concrete, copy-paste-ready patterns.

Registering Multiple Panels

Each panel lives in its own service provider. Register them all in bootstrap/providers.php.

// app/Providers/Filament/AdminPanelProvider.php
public function panel(Panel $panel): Panel
{
    return $panel
        ->id('admin')
        ->path('admin')
        ->authGuard('admin')          // dedicated guard
        ->login(AdminLogin::class)
        ->middleware([
            EncryptCookies::class,
            VerifyCsrfToken::class,
            RequireAdminRole::class,  // custom middleware
        ])
        ->resources([
            UserResource::class,
            TenantResource::class,
        ]);
}

// app/Providers/Filament/TenantPanelProvider.php
public function panel(Panel $panel): Panel
{
    return $panel
        ->id('tenant')
        ->path('app')
        ->authGuard('web')            // standard guard, tenant resolved by middleware
        ->tenant(Team::class, slugAttribute: 'slug')
        ->tenantMiddleware([EnsureTeamIsActive::class], isPersistent: true)
        ->resources([DashboardResource::class]);
}

Isolating Auth Guards

Define a dedicated admin guard in config/auth.php:

'guards' => [
    'admin' => [
        'driver'   => 'session',
        'provider' => 'admins',
    ],
],
'providers' => [
    'admins' => [
        'driver' => 'eloquent',
        'model'  => App\Models\Admin::class,
    ],
],

This means an authenticated User session cannot bleed into the admin panel — a common security gap when teams share a single guard.

Custom Panel Middleware for Tenant Resolution

When the tenant panel resolves a team from the URL slug, you want that team bound into the container early so every resource query can scope itself automatically.

class ResolveCurrentTeam
{
    public function handle(Request $request, Closure $next): mixed
    {
        $team = Team::where('slug', $request->route('tenant'))->firstOrFail();

        app()->instance(CurrentTeam::class, $team);
        app()->instance('current_team_id', $team->id);

        return $next($request);
    }
}

Resources then inject CurrentTeam via the container rather than re-querying:

public static function getEloquentQuery(): Builder
{
    return parent::getEloquentQuery()
        ->where('team_id', app('current_team_id'));
}

Table Query Tuning at Scale

Filament tables issue a COUNT(*) for pagination and a SELECT for the page. On large tables both queries hit the same indexes — or miss them.

Disable the Count Query When Unnecessary

public function table(Table $table): Table
{
    return $table
        ->paginated([25, 50, 100])
        ->paginationPageOptions([25, 50])
        ->extremePaginationLinks(false)
        ->query(
            Invoice::query()
                ->select(['id','number','status','total','created_at'])
                ->with('customer:id,name')   // avoid N+1
        );
}

For very large tables, replace the default paginator with a cursor paginator — Filament supports it natively:

->paginationMode(PaginationMode::Cursor)

Cursor pagination skips COUNT(*) entirely and uses a keyset on an indexed column.

Eager-Load Relationship Columns

Every TextColumn that calls ->relationship() under the hood issues a separate query per row unless you declare the relationship in $with or override getEloquentQuery().

TextColumn::make('customer.name')
    ->searchable(query: function (Builder $query, string $search): Builder {
        return $query->whereHas('customer', fn ($q) =>
            $q->where('name', 'like', "%{$search}%")
        );
    }),

Always profile with \DB::enableQueryLog() or Telescope before deploying a new resource to production.

Key Takeaways

• Register each panel in its own provider; use ->authGuard() to isolate session state per audience.
• Bind resolved tenant models into the container in persistent middleware so resources never re-query.
• Use ->select() on the base query to avoid fetching unused columns across wide tables.
• Switch to cursor pagination for append-only or time-series tables to eliminate expensive COUNT(*) calls.
• Always declare eager-loads explicitly; Filament's relationship columns will not batch-load automatically unless you tell them to.