Symfony describes itself as both a set of reusable components and a framework for web projects. This means that even if you don’t use its framework for request routing or other web-related tasks, you can still use its individual components for tasks such as templating, managing configuration files, or debugging.
Like Laravel, Symfony has a command-line program used to create and manage projects. Install the symfony program and rename the downloaded installer file to symfony. Move it into a directory in your system path. On Linux or OS X, make the symfony program executable by typing chmod a+x /path/to/symfony (where /path/to/symfony is the full path of the place you’ve put the symfony program).
Then, to create a new web project that uses Symfony, run symfony new project- name, substituting your project name for project-name. For example, running the command symfony new menu creates a directory called menu and populates it with the code and configuration scaffolding necessary for Symfony to work properly.
Symfony includes some glue that makes it easy to run your project in PHP’s built-in web server. Just change your current directory to your project directory (e.g., cd menu) and then run php app/console server:run. Then visit http://localhost:8000/ in your web browser, and you’ll see a “Welcome to Symfony” page complete with lots of interesting diagnostic information at the bottom.
With Symfony, routes are not specified in one central place. Instead, individual classes in the src/AppBundle/Controller directory define the methods that are triggered by the routes that the app handles. A special annotation in a comment next to a method indicates what route the method handles. Example 18-3 defines a handler for a GET /show request. Put it in MenuController.php in src/AppBundle/Controllers.
Example 18-3. Specifying a route with Symfony
namespace AppBundle\Controller;
use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\Controller;
use Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\Configuration\Route;
use Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\Configuration\Method;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;
class MenuController extends Controller
{
/**
* @Route(“/show”)
* @Method(“GET”)
*/
public function showAction()
{
$now = new \DateTime();
$items = [ “Fried Potatoes”, “Boiled Potatoes”, “Baked Potatoes” ];
return $this->render(“show-menu.html.twig”,
[ ‘when’ => $now,
‘what’ => $items ]);
}
}
In Example 18-3, the items in the comment before the showAction() method indicate the route that showAction() handles: URL path /show with method GET. The render() method returns a Symfony data structure that holds the contents of the response. Its first argument is the name of a view template file to use, and the second argument is data to pass to the template. It is possible to use plain PHP as a template language with Symfony, but its default setup is to use the Twig templating engine, so that’s what’s specified here.
Symfony’s view directory is app/Resources/views. This means that passing show-menu.html.twig to render() tells Symfony to look for app/Resources/views/ show-menu.html.twig in your project directory. Save the contents of Example 18-4 in that place.
Example 18-4. Defining a Symfony view
{% extends ‘base.html.twig’ %}
{% block body %}
<p> At {{ when|date(“g:i a”) }}, here is what’s available: </p>
<ul>
{% for item in what %}
<li>{{ item }}</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
{% endblock %}
In Twig, {% %} indicates a templating language command and {{ }} indicates a variable whose value (with proper HTML escaping) should be included in the output. Its syntax may take some getting used to, but Twig is a powerful and speedy templating language.
Source: Sklar David (2016), Learning PHP: A Gentle Introduction to the Web’s Most Popular Language, O’Reilly Media; 1st edition.