What alternatives exist for securely storing and managing resources in PHP, particularly when dealing with encryption keys?

When dealing with securely storing and managing encryption keys in PHP, one alternative is to utilize environment variables to store sensitive information. By storing encryption keys in environment variables, you can keep them separate from your codebase and reduce the risk of exposure. This approach also allows for easy configuration management and can be accessed securely within your PHP application.

// Storing encryption key in environment variable
$encryptionKey = getenv('ENCRYPTION_KEY');

// Using the encryption key in your code
$encryptedData = openssl_encrypt($data, 'AES-256-CBC', $encryptionKey, 0, $iv);