It is very common to track and store user information in cookies; however, since cookies are stored on the client side, we will use sessions for storing user information and making it available across the web application after authenticating the users. We will still use authentication for determining whether the submitted data is valid. Upon authentication, we will load the required user information into session variables and use that information wherever required. For building authentication for our student portal, let us begin by creating our library files to support the authentication.

Create the lib/Session.php file with the following code:

<?php

class Session
{

  public static function init()
  {
    session_start();
  }
  public static function destroy()
  {
    session_destroy();
  }

}

In this snippet, we begin creating the Session library that contains two methods, init and destroy. The init and destroy functions use the session_start and session_destroy functions...