- PHP — Login Example
- Login Page
- Enter Username and Password
- Logout.php
- PHP Login Script with Session
- What is inside?
- Ways to create an authentication system
- About this example
- File structure
- User login interface
- Login form validation
- PHP code to process login
- Get logged-in user profile data to display a welcome message
- Member.php
- Redirect users to log in or Dashboard based on Session
- Handling logout in PHP
- DataSource.php
- Database script
- Test login details
- PHP login script with session output
PHP — Login Example
Php login script is used to provide the authentication for our web pages. the Script executes after submitting the user login button.
Login Page
Login page should be as follows and works based on session. If the user close the session, it will erase the session data.
body < padding-top: 40px; padding-bottom: 40px; background-color: #ADABAB; >.form-signin < max-width: 330px; padding: 15px; margin: 0 auto; color: #017572; >.form-signin .form-signin-heading, .form-signin .checkbox < margin-bottom: 10px; >.form-signin .checkbox < font-weight: normal; >.form-signin .form-control < position: relative; height: auto; -webkit-box-sizing: border-box; -moz-box-sizing: border-box; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 10px; font-size: 16px; >.form-signin .form-control:focus < z-index: 2; >.form-signin input[type="email"] < margin-bottom: -1px; border-bottom-right-radius: 0; border-bottom-left-radius: 0; border-color:#017572; >.form-signin input[type="password"] < margin-bottom: 10px; border-top-left-radius: 0; border-top-right-radius: 0; border-color:#017572; >h2Enter Username and Password
else < $msg = 'Wrong username or password'; >> ?>Click here to clean Session.
Logout.php
It will erase the session data.
It will produce the following result −
PHP Login Script with Session
In this tutorial, let us create a login script with a session in PHP. It has a simple example of implementing user authentication. This example uses a standard login form to get the user login details. And it preserves the login state with PHP sessions.
Login would be the first step of many applications. Sometimes, part of the privileged functionalities of the application will ask users to log in.
So, the login script is an integral part of an application. I will present to you the implementation of the login system with minimal code.
Authentication will help us to identify genuine users. By enabling authentication, we can protect our website from anonymous access.
What is inside?
Ways to create an authentication system
There are different ways of implementing an authentication system. The most popular way is to get the username and password via a login form and authenticate based on them.
Recently, authentication using OTP is also becoming the norm. The OTP will be dynamic and allowed for one-time.
For OTP authentication, the application sends it either via SMS or email. In a previous article, we have seen an example code in PHP to log in by sending OTP via email.
About this example
This example has the user’s database with name, email, password and more details. It has an HTML form with inputs to get the user login credentials.
The PHP code will receive the posted data when the user submits their login details. It compares the entered data against the user database.
If a match is found, then it sets the user login session. This authentication code preserves the user id in a PHP session. The existence of this session will state the user authentication status.
After authentication, the PHP $_SESSION super global variable will contain the user id. The $_SESSION[“member_id”] is set to manage the logged-in session. It will remain until log out or quit the browser.
During logout, we unset all the session variables using the PHP unset() function.
File structure
The below screenshot shows the organized file structure of this user login example. The Member.php is the model class with authentication functionalities.
The DataSource.php file contains functions to get a connection and access the database.
In a view directory, I have created all the UI-related files for the login and the dashboard interface. It also contains a stylesheet used for this UI.
The index.php is the landing page that checks the user’s logged-in session. Then it redirects users either to log in or to the dashboard.
The login-action.php and logout.php files are the PHP endpoints. They handle actions as requested by the users via the interactive authentication Interface.
User login interface
Creating an HTML form to log in is the first step. It is to get the login details from users.
This example has two fields, username and password, for user login.
I have specified the validation function and the PHP endpoint with the form tag.
The HTML contains elements to display client-side validation error. Also, it has the code to show a server-side error response based on the login result.
?>