What are common methods for handling login and logout functionality in PHP web applications?

Handling login and logout functionality in PHP web applications often involves creating sessions to keep track of user authentication status. For login, you typically verify user credentials against a database and set session variables upon successful authentication. For logout, you destroy the session variables to log the user out. 

// Login functionality
session_start();
if ($_SERVER["REQUEST_METHOD"] == "POST") {
    // Verify user credentials here
    if ($valid_credentials) {
        $_SESSION['logged_in'] = true;
        // Redirect to a secured page
        header("Location: secured_page.php");
        exit();
    } else {
        echo "Invalid credentials";
    }
}

// Logout functionality
session_start();
if (isset($_SESSION['logged_in'])) {
    session_destroy();
    // Redirect to a login page
    header("Location: login.php");
    exit();
}

Keywords

Sessions Cookies Authentication Authorization Security

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