What are the best practices for handling user sessions and authentication in PHP?

To handle user sessions and authentication in PHP, it is important to use secure methods to store session data and validate user credentials. One common practice is to use PHP's built-in session handling functions to manage user sessions, and to hash and salt passwords before storing them in a database for authentication. 

// Start a secure session
session_start();

// Set session variables
$_SESSION['user_id'] = $user_id;

// Validate user credentials
$password = hash('sha256', $password . $salt);
$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = '$username' AND password = '$password'";
$result = mysqli_query($connection, $query);
if(mysqli_num_rows($result) == 1) {
    // User authenticated, proceed with actions
} else {
    // Invalid credentials, redirect or display error message
}

Keywords

session management authentication PHP cookies security

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