


What are the best practices for writing secure and maintainable PHP code?
Jun 07, 2025 am 12:05 AMWriting safe and easy-to-maintain PHP code requires starting from three aspects: structure, habits and security awareness. 1. Use mainstream frameworks (such as Laravel, Symfony) and follow PSR standards to improve code consistency and readability; 2. Strictly verify input and escape output to prevent SQL injection and XSS attacks; 3. Reasonably organize code structures, separate business logic and data operations, and enhance maintainability; 4. Unify error handling and logging, turn off error display in production environment, and avoid information leakage; 5. Manage sensitive information, set file permissions, enable HTTPS and security middleware to fully ensure application security.
Writing safe and easy-to-maintain PHP code is not only a technical issue, but also a habit. Many people only think about function implementation at the beginning, but it will be troublesome to modify later and are prone to safety problems. In fact, as long as you start from the aspects of structure, coding habits and safety awareness, you can avoid many pitfalls.
Use modern frameworks and standard specifications
PHP frameworks (such as Laravel, Symfony) have helped you deal with many underlying security issues, such as SQL injection, CSRF protection, etc. Moreover, these frameworks themselves follow PSR standards (such as PSR-4 automatic loading), which can make your code easier to be understood and maintained by others.
suggestion:
- Try to use mainstream frameworks instead of making your own wheels
- Follow PSR coding specifications and maintain the uniform code style
- Use namespaces and automatic loading mechanisms to reduce the confusion caused by manual include files
This not only makes the code clearer, but also facilitates team collaboration. Those who take over the later stage will not be confused as soon as they come up.
Input verification and output escape cannot be saved
Regardless of whether the user enters form data or API request parameters, strict verification must be done. Don't believe in any input from users, this is the first principle of writing security code.
For example:
- The mailbox must be verified using filter_var or the method provided by the framework.
- Integer types need to be processed by intval() or declared with type
- The content output to the HTML page should be htmlspecialchars()
A common mistake is to directly splice the values ??of $_GET or $_POST into SQL queries or page content, which can easily lead to injection attacks or XSS.
Reasonably organize code structures to improve maintainability
A good code structure allows people to see logical relationships at a glance. For example, separate business logic from database operations and encapsulate data access using service classes or Repository mode. The controller is only responsible for receiving requests and returning responses.
Practical practices include:
- The controller is as simple as possible and does not make complicated logic
- Abstracting reused functions into classes or functions
- Use dependency injection to manage relationships between objects
- Logging and exception handling unified entry, don't try-catch everywhere
In this way, when modifying the function, you only need to change the part, so that you will not affect the whole body by just one move.
Security settings and error handling must be in place
The development environment can display all error messages, but the production environment must turn off display_errors and only logs are recorded. Otherwise, if the path, SQL statements and even configuration information are exposed, the hacker can follow the clues.
in addition:
- Don't hard-code sensitive information in your code, such as database passwords, and use .env to manage it better
- Set appropriate file permissions to prevent files uploaded in the web directory from being executed
- Use HTTPS to transfer important data to prevent theft by the middlemen
Some frameworks have security middleware by default, remember to enable them.
Basically that's it. It is not necessary to do everything to be safe and well-maintained, but the sooner you develop these habits, the less chance you will have to step on the pitfalls later.
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