Hello again, here are some thing that I can suggest to make this work.

Your service provider SHOULD ONLY be loaded/registered when Illuminate\Auth\AuthServiceProvider so http://laravel.io/bin/V6kOd#48-50 should be able to do that.

However there might still be some issue if between "registering" and "booting" there already a code that need to use Auth::..., since you only extend "servicerunner" during "booting". So depends on whether you have any code this might not work.

Alternatively you can make it eager (not deferred) and wrap the extends inside an event http://laravel.io/bin/LNqe0 so it should solve the above problem.

p/s: The event is fired from https://github.com/laravel/framework/blob/4.2/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Application.php#L375

crynobone, I apologize for the late reply but unfortunately neither was able to resolve the issue. The authentication continues to work normally in all environments except artisan, in which it will only work with the 'eloquent' driver set.

Perhaps there is something unique to the artisan bootstrapping process and how it relates to the IoC container vs an issue with the provider load order?