What are the best practices for handling role-based access control in PHP applications to ensure efficient and secure user permission management?

Role-based access control (RBAC) is a method of restricting system access to authorized users. To efficiently and securely manage user permissions in PHP applications, it is recommended to define roles, assign permissions to each role, and check user roles against required permissions before granting access to specific resources.

// Define roles and permissions
$roles = [
    'admin' => ['manage_users', 'manage_content'],
    'editor' => ['manage_content'],
    'viewer' => ['view_content']
];

// Check user role against required permission
$userRole = 'admin';
$requiredPermission = 'manage_users';

if (in_array($requiredPermission, $roles[$userRole])) {
    // Grant access to resource
    echo "Access granted!";
} else {
    // Deny access
    echo "Access denied!";
}