PHP 7: Real World Application Development

Using middleware to implement access control

As the name implies, middleware sits in the middle of a sequence of function or method calls. Accordingly, middleware is well suited for the task of "gate keeper". You can easily implement an Access Control List (ACL) mechanism with a middleware class that reads the ACL, and allows or denies access to the next function or method call in the sequence.

How to do it...

1. Probably the most difficult part of the process is determining which factors to include in the ACL. For the purposes of illustration, let's say that our users are all assigned a level and a status. In this illustration, the level is defined as follows:

     'levels' => [0, 'BEG', 'INT', 'ADV']

2. The status could indicate how far they are in the membership ...