Symfony

About the Tutorial

Symfony is an open-source PHP web application framework, designed for developers who
need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. Symfony is
sponsored by SensioLabs. It was developed by Fabien Potencier in 2005. This tutorial will
give you a quick introduction to Symfony framework and make you comfortable with its
various components.

Audience
This tutorial has been prepared for beginners who want to learn the fundamental concenpts
of Symfony framework. The readers will get enough understanding on how to create and
develop a website using Symfony.

Prerequisites
Before proceeding with the various types of components given in this tutorial, it is being
assumed that the readers are already aware about what a Framework is. In addition to
this, it will also be very helpful if you have a sound knowledge on HTML, PHP, and the
OOPS concepts.

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Table of Contents
About the Tutorial .................................................................................................................................... i

Audience .................................................................................................................................................. i

Prerequisites ............................................................................................................................................ i

Copyright & Disclaimer ............................................................................................................................. i

Table of Contents .................................................................................................................................... ii

1. SYMFONY ─ INTRODUCTION................................................................................................ 1

2. SYMFONY ─ INSTALLATION .................................................................................................. 3

System Requirements ............................................................................................................................. 3

Symfony Installer .................................................................................................................................... 3

Composer-based Installation ................................................................................................................... 5

Running the Application .......................................................................................................................... 5

3. SYMFONY ─ ARCHITECTURE ................................................................................................ 6

Web Framework...................................................................................................................................... 7

4. SYMFONY ─ COMPONENTS ................................................................................................. 9

Installing a Symfony Component ............................................................................................................. 9

Details of Symfony Components ........................................................................................................... 10

5. SYMFONY – SERVICE CONTAINER ...................................................................................... 23

6. SYMFONY ─ EVENTS & EVENTLISTENER ............................................................................. 30

7. SYMFONY ─ EXPRESSION ................................................................................................... 35

8. SYMFONY ─ BUNDLES ........................................................................................................ 37

Structure of a Bundle ............................................................................................................................ 37

Creating a Bundle .................................................................................................................................. 37

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9. SYMFONY ─ CREATING A SIMPLE WEB APPLICATION......................................................... 40

Controller .............................................................................................................................................. 40

Create a Route ...................................................................................................................................... 41

10. SYMFONY ─ CONTROLLERS ................................................................................................ 42

Request Object ...................................................................................................................................... 42

Response Object ................................................................................................................................... 43

FrontController ..................................................................................................................................... 44

11. SYMFONY ─ ROUTING........................................................................................................ 46

Annotations .......................................................................................................................................... 46

Routing Concepts .................................................................................................................................. 46

Redirecting to a Page ............................................................................................................................ 49

12. SYMFONY ─ VIEW ENGINE ................................................................................................. 51

Templates ............................................................................................................................................. 51

Twig Engine ........................................................................................................................................... 51

Layouts.................................................................................................................................................. 58

Assets .................................................................................................................................................... 58

13. SYMFONY ─ DOCTRINE ORM ............................................................................................. 60

Database Model .................................................................................................................................... 60

Doctrine ORM ....................................................................................................................................... 60

Doctrine ORM Example ......................................................................................................................... 60

14. SYMFONY ─ FORMS ........................................................................................................... 71

Form Fields............................................................................................................................................ 71

Form Helper Function............................................................................................................................ 76

Student Form Application ..................................................................................................................... 77

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15. SYMFONY ─ VALIDATION ................................................................................................... 85

Validation Constraints ........................................................................................................................... 85

Validation Example ............................................................................................................................... 89

16. SYMFONY ─ FILE UPLOADING ............................................................................................ 96

17. SYMFONY ─ AJAX CONTROL ............................................................................................. 102

AJAX ─ Working Example..................................................................................................................... 102

18. SYMFONY ─ COOKIES & SESSION MANAGEMENT ............................................................ 106

Cookie ................................................................................................................................................. 106

Session ................................................................................................................................................ 107

19. SYMFONY ─ INTERNATIONALIZATION .............................................................................. 108

20. SYMFONY ─ LOGGING...................................................................................................... 111

21. SYMFONY ─ EMAIL MANAGEMENT ................................................................................. 112

22. SYMFONY ─ UNIT TESTING .............................................................................................. 114

PHPUnit............................................................................................................................................... 114

Unit test .............................................................................................................................................. 114

23. SYMFONY ─ ADVANCED CONCEPTS ................................................................................. 116

HTTP Cache ......................................................................................................................................... 116

Debug.................................................................................................................................................. 119

Profiler ................................................................................................................................................ 119

Security ............................................................................................................................................... 120

Workflow ............................................................................................................................................ 126

24. SYMFONY ─ SYMFONY REST EDITION .............................................................................. 131

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25. SYMFONY ─ SYMFONY CMF EDITION ............................................................................... 132

26. SYMFONY ─ COMPLETE WORKING EXAMPLE .................................................................. 134

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 1. Symfony ─ Introduction Symfony

A PHP web framework is a collection of classes, which helps to develop a web application.
Symfony is an open-source MVC framework for rapidly developing modern web
applications. Symfony is a full-stack web framework. It contains a set of reusable PHP
components. You can use any Symfony components in applications, independently from
the framework.

Symfony has a huge amount of functionality and active community. It has a flexible
configuration using YAML, XML, or annotations. Symfony integrates with an independent
library and PHP Unit. Symfony is mainly inspired by Ruby on Rails, Django, and Spring
web application frameworks. Symfony components are being used by a lot of open source
projects that include Composer, Drupal, and phpBB.

The Symfony framework consists of several components, such as the HttpFoundation

component that understands HTTP and offers a nice request and response object used by
the other components. Others are merely helper components, such as the Validator, that
helps to validate data. Kernel component is the heart of the system. Kernel is basically the
‘main class’ that manages the environment and has the responsibility of handling a http
request.

Symfony’s well-organized structure, clean code, and good programming practices make
web development easier. Symfony is very flexible, used to build micro-sites and handle
enterprise applications with billions of connections.

Symfony Framework ─ Features

Symfony is designed to optimize the development of web applications and grows in
features with every release.

Some of the salient features of Symfony Framework is as follows:

 Model-View-Controller based system

 High-performance PHP framework
 Flexible URI routing
 Code reusable and easier to maintain
 Session management
 Error logging
 Full-featured database classes with support for several platforms
 Supports a huge and active community
 Set of decoupled and reusable components
 Standardization and interoperability of applications
 Security against cross-site request forgery and other attacks
 Twig template engine.

Symfony offers a lot of flexibility to developers. It has great features for debugging, code
readability, and developing extensible programs.

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Symfony is a full-stack web framework; it is a very effective tool for creating web
applications. Numerous companies offer Symfony services to clients.

Following are some of the benefits that you get by using the Symfony Framework.

 Microframework - Symfony can be used to develop a specific functionality. You

don’t need to redevelop or install the entire framework.

 Reduces development time overhead.

 Extremely mature templating engine and quickly delivers content to the users.

 Compatible and extensible – Programmers can easily extend all framework classes.

Symfony Framework ─ Applications

Symfony components can be used as a part of other applications such as Drupal, Laravel,
phpBB, Behat, Doctrine, and Joomla.

 Drupal 8 ─ Drupal is an open source content management PHP framework. Drupal

8 uses core layers of Symfony and extends it to provide support for Drupal modules.

 Thelia ─ Thelia is a Symfony-based e-commerce solution. Initially, Thelia was

written in PHP code and MySQL, however, it was lagging to produce faster
applications. To overcome this drawback, Thelia integrated with Symfony to
develop the applications in a customizable way.

 Dailymotion ─ Dailymotion is one of the world's largest independent video

entertainment website based in France. Once they decided to migrate open source
framework with a large community, Dailymotion developers decided to use
Symfony components features for its flexibility.

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 2. Symfony ─ Installation Symfony

This chapter explains how to install Symfony framework on your machine. Symfony
framework installation is very simple and easy. You have two methods to create
applications in Symfony framework. First method is using Symfony Installer, an application
to create a project in Symfony framework. Second method is composer-based installation.
Let’s go through each of the methods one by one in detail in the following sections.

System Requirements
Before moving to installation, you require the following system requirements.

 Web server (Any one of the following)

o WAMP (Windows)
o LAMP (Linux)
o XAMP (Multi-platform)
o MAMP (Macintosh)
o Nginx (Multi-platform)
o Microsoft IIS (Windows)
o PHP built-in development web server (Multi-platform)
 Operating System: Cross-platform
 Browser Support: IE (Internet Explorer 8+), Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera
 PHP Compatibility: PHP 5.4 or later. To get the maximum benefit, use the latest version.

We will use PHP built-in development web server for this tutorial.

Symfony Installer
Symfony Installer is used to create web applications in Symfony framework. Now, let’s
configure the Symfony installer using the following command.

$ sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin

$ sudo curl -LsS https://symfony.com/installer -o /usr/local/bin/symfony

$ sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/symfony

Now, you have installed Symfony installer on your machine.

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Create Your First Symfony Application

Following syntax is used to create a Symfony application in the latest version.

Syntax
symfony new app_name

Here, app_name is your new application name. You can specify any name you want.

Example
symfony new HelloWorld

After executing the above command, you will see the following response.

Downloading Symfony...

0 B/5.5 MiB ░░░░░░░░░░░

……………………………………………………………

……………………………………………………………

Preparing project...

✔ Symfony 3.2.7 was successfully installed. Now you can:

* Change your current directory to /Users/../workspace/firstapp

* Configure your application in app/config/parameters.yml file.

* Run your application:

1. Execute the php bin/console server:run command.
2. Browse to the http://localhost:8000 URL.

* Read the documentation at http://symfony.com/doc

This command creates a new directory called “firstapp/“ that contains an empty project of
Symfony framework latest version.

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Install Specific Version

If you need to install a specific Symfony version, use the following command.

symfony new app_name 2.8

symfony new app_name 3.1

Composer-based Installation
You can create Symfony applications using the Composer. Hopefully, you have installed
the composer on your machine. If the composer is not installed, download and install it.

The following command is used to create a project using the composer.

$ composer create-project symfony/framework-standard-edition app_name

If you need to specify a specific version, you can specify in the above command.

Running the Application

Move to the project directory and run the application using the following command.

cd HelloWorld
php bin/console server:run

After executing the above command, open your browser and request the url
http://localhost:8000/. It produces the following result.

Result

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 3. Symfony ─ Architecture Symfony

Symfony is basically a collection of high quality components and bundles. Components are
collection of classes providing a single core functionality. For example, Cache component
provides cache functionality, which can be added to any application. Components are
building blocks of a Symfony application. Symfony has 30+ high quality components,
which are used in many PHP framework such as Laravel, Silex, etc.

Bundles are similar to plugin but easy to create and easy to use. Actually, a Symfony
application is itself a bundle composed of other bundles. A single bundle can use any
number of Symfony component and also third-party components to provide features such
as Webframework, database access, etc. Symfony core web-framework is a bundle called
FrameworkBundle and there is a bundle called FrameworkExtraBundle, which provides
more sophisticated options to write a web application.

The relationship between the Components, Bundles, and Symfony application is specified
in the following diagram.

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 Symfony

Web Framework
Symfony is mainly designed to write high-quality web application with relative ease. It
provides various options to write different types of web application from simple web site
to advanced REST based web services. Symfony provides web framework as separate
bundles. The common bundles used in Symfony web framework are as follows:

 FrameworkBundle
 FrameworkExtraBundle
 DoctrineBundle

Symfony web framework is based on Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. Model

represents the structure of our business entities. View shows the models to the user in
the best possible way depending on the situation. Controller handles all the request from
the user, does the actual work by interacting with Model and finally provides the View with
the necessary data to show it to the user.

Symfony web framework provides all the high-level features required for an enterprise-
grade application. Following is a simple workflow of Symfony web application.

The workflow consists of the following steps.

Step 1: The user sends a request to the application through the browser, say
http://www.symfonyexample.com/index.

Step 2: The browser will send a request to the web server, say Apache web server.

Step 3: The web server will forward the request to the underlying PHP, which in turn
sends it to Symfony web framework.

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 Symfony

Step 4: HttpKernel is the core component of the Symfony web framework. HttpKernel
resolves the controller of the given request using Routing component and forward the
request to the target controller.

Step 5: All the business logic takes place in the target controller.

Step 6: The controller will interact with Model, which in turn interacts with Datasource
through Doctrine ORM.

Step 7: Once the controller completes the process, it either generates the response itself
or through View Engine, and sends it back to the web server.

Step 8: Finally, the response will be sent to the requested browser by the web server.

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 4. Symfony ─ Components Symfony

As discussed earlier, Symfony components are standalone PHP library providing a specific
feature, which can be used in any PHP application. Useful new components are being
introduced in each and every release of Symfony. Currently, there are 30+ high quality
components in Symfony framework. Let us learn about the usage of Symfony components
in this chapter.

Installing a Symfony Component

Symfony components can be installed easily using the composer command. Following
generic command can be used to install any Symfony component.

cd /path/to/project/dir
composer require symfony/<component_name>

Let us create a simple php application and try to install Filesystem component.

Step 1: Create a folder for the application, filesystem-example

cd /path/to/dev/folder
mdkir filesystem-example
cd filesystem-example

Step 2: Install Filesystem component using the following command.

composer require symfony/filesystem

Step 3: Create a file main.php and enter the following code.

<?php
require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
use Symfony\Component\Filesystem\Filesystem;
use Symfony\Component\Filesystem\Exception\IOExceptionInterface;
$fs = new Filesystem();
try {
$fs->mkdir('./sample-dir');
$fs->touch('./sample-dir/text.txt');
} catch (IOExceptionInterface $e) {
echo $e;
}
?>

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The first line is very important, which loads all the necessary classes from all the
components installed using the Composer command. The next lines use the Filesystem
class.

Step 4: Run the application using the following command and it will create a new folder
sample-dir and a file test.txt under it.

php main.php

Details of Symfony Components

Symfony provides components ranging from simple feature, say file system to advanced
feature, say events, container technology, and dependency injection. Let us know about
all the components one by one in the following sections.

Filesystem
Filesystem component provides a basic system command related to files and directories
such as file creation, folder creation, file existence, etc. Filesystem component can be
installed using the following command.

composer require symfony/filesystem

Finder
Finder component provides fluent classes to find files and directories in a specified path.
It provides an easy way to iterate over the files in a path. Finder component can be
installed using the following command.

composer require symfony/finder

Console
Console component provides various options to easily create commands, which can be
executed in a terminal. Symfony uses the Command component extensively to provide
various functionalities such as creating a new application, creating a bundle, etc. Even the
PHP build in web server can be invoked using Symfony command, php bin/console
server:run as seen in the installation section. The Console component can be installed
using the following command.

composer require symfony/console

Let us create a simple application and create a command, HelloCommand using the
Console component and invoke it.

Step 1: Create a project using the following command.

cd /path/to/project
composer require symfony/console

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Step 2: Create a file main.php and include the following code.

<?php
require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
use Symfony\Component\Console\Application;
$app = new Application();
$app->run();
?>

Application class sets up the necessary functionality of a bare-bone console application.

Step 3: Run the application, php main.php, which will produce the following result.

Console Tool

Usage:
command [options] [arguments]

Options:
-h, --help Display this help message
-q, --quiet Do not output any message
-V, --version Display this application version
--ansi Force ANSI output
--no-ansi Disable ANSI output
-n, --no-interaction Do not ask any interactive question
-v|vv|vvv, --verbose Increase the verbosity of messages: 1 for normal
output, 2 for more verbose output and 3 for debug

Available commands:
help Displays help for a command
list Lists commands

Step 4: Create a class called HelloCommand extending Command class in the

main.php itself.

use Symfony\Component\Console\Command\Command;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Input\InputInterface;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Output\OutputInterface;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Input\InputArgument;

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class HelloCommand extends Command

{
}

The application uses following four classes available in Command component.

 Command - Used to create a new command

 InputInterface - Used to set user inputs
 InputArgument - Used to get user inputs
 OutputInterface - Used to print output to the console

Step 5: Create a function configure() and set name, description, and help text.

protected function configure()

{
$this
->setName('app:hello')
->setDescription('Sample command, hello')
->setHelp('This command is a sample command')
}

Step 6: Create an input argument, user for the command and set as mandatory.

protected function configure()

{
$this
->setName('app:hello')
->setDescription('Sample command, hello')
->setHelp('This command is a sample command')
->addArgument('name', InputArgument::REQUIRED, 'name of the user');
}

Step 7: Create a function execute() with two arguments InputArgument and

OutputArgument.

protected function execute(InputInterface $input, OutputInterface $output)

{
}

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Step 8: Use InputArgument to get the user details entered by the user and print it to
the console using OutputArgument.

protected function execute(InputInterface $input, OutputInterface $output)

{
$name = $input->getArgument('name');
$output->writeln('Hello, ' . $name);
}

Step 9: Register the HelloCommand into the application using the add method of
Application class.

$app->add(new HelloCommand());

The complete application is as follows.

<?php
require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
use Symfony\Component\Console\Application;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Command\Command;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Input\InputInterface;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Output\OutputInterface;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Input\InputArgument;

class HelloCommand extends Command

{
protected function configure()
{
$this
->setName('app:hello')
->setDescription('Sample command, hello')
->setHelp('This command is a sample command')
->addArgument('name', InputArgument::REQUIRED, 'name of the user');
}

protected function execute(InputInterface $input, OutputInterface $output)

{
$name = $input->getArgument('name');
$output->writeln('Hello, ' . $name);

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}
}

$app = new Application();

$app->add(new HelloCommand());
$app->run();
?>

Step 10: Now, execute the application using the following command and the result will
be Hello, Jon as expected.

php main.php app:hello Jon

Symfony comes with a pre-built binary called console in the bin directory of any Symfony
web application, which can be used to invoke the commands in an application.

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