Symfony2 Tips

Note: Include Phar archives on Ubuntu 11.04

2011-05-11T15:41:00.000+02:00

To include/require phar archives you have to whitelist phar files in your php.ini/suhosin.ini configuration file.

suhosin.executor.include.whitelist = phar

Symfony2 PR12 released

2011-04-19T15:58:00.000+02:00

Just a quick notice: Symfony2 PR12 released

Propel2 - 'Whether it is called Propel2 or not is irrelevant.'

2011-04-15T09:50:00.002+02:00

Yesterday something popped out on my twitter stream and made me a bit curious. Francois Zaninotto is working on an ActiveRecord Implementation built on top of some Symfony2 components, Doctrine2 and Twig, maybe it will be later called Propel2 or not.

Check it out here.

Features currently supported (out of the project readme on github)

Working ActiveRecord builder (no handling of relations for now)
- Generated entities are empty classes extending generated Base Entities extending nothing
- Getter & setter generation
- Metadata loader
- Access to the EntityManager from within an Entity
- fromArray and toArray
- isNew, isModified, etc.
- ActiveEntity methods: save(), delete()
Basic behavior support
- Ability to alter the data structure
- Ability to modify the generated code pretty much everywhere
- Timestampable behavior example
Template customization via partials

I love this new era of PHP projects:

Just to mention a few ;)

Sismo - Your 'friendly' Continuous Testing Server

2011-04-13T15:24:00.002+02:00

Fabien Potencier released finally the first version of Sismo. Get it at GitHub.

SILEX - a PHP micro-framework

2011-04-08T10:58:00.000+02:00

New toys for us to play with!

Fabien Potencier and Igor Wiedler brought us under the flagship of Sensio Labs a Sinatra.rb inspired micro framework.

Check out their presentation:

Silex - The Symfony2 Microframework

Resources:

via Daniel Bayerlein

For you JavaScript freaks out there, I created some months ago a prototype of Sinatra.rb in JavaScript based on MooTools 1.3 called Dean.js, the source is available at github.

Symfony Live Paris 2011 Slides

2011-03-22T12:56:00.002+01:00

German php resource phpgangsta.de collected a nice list of slide from Symfony Live Paris 2011.

Slides, You should really keep an eye on:

Symfony2 – from the trenches
by Lukas Kahwe Smith, Jordi Boggiano, Jeremy Mikola

Introducing Assetic: Asset Management for PHP 5.3
by Kris Wallsmith

UserBundle (sfGuard for Symfony2)
by Jeremy Mikola

Monolog
by Jordi Boggiano

Being dangerous with Twig
by Ryan Weaver

Behavior Driven Development for Symfony2 (with behat)
by Konstantin Kudryashov

(via phpgangsta.de)

WebProfilerBundleExtra - or how to boost Symfony2 WebProfiler from awesome to double awesome

2011-03-22T12:41:00.004+01:00

Developer Vincent Bouzeran (Twitter, Github) created some nifty Bundle called 'WebProfilerExtraBundle' that extends the Symfony2 web profiler and provieds support for the components:

Assetic
Container
Routing
Twig

You can install it from here.
(Tested with Symfony2 PR8)

Syntax highlighting Twig templates in Redcar/Textmate

2011-03-21T16:00:00.000+01:00

If your favourite IDE/editor is Textmate or Redcar this could be something for you.
Today I found a dyntax highlighting Textmate bundle for Twig. You can download it directly from github. Just put the contents of the archive in a folder and name it php-twig.tmbundle.

Bundle installation instructions for Textmate can be found here and for Redcar here.

How to free Symfony2 from the sandbox tutorial (with some help from Git)

2011-02-11T16:43:00.001+01:00

Note

It's possible that this tutorial works no more, because of changes made to Symfony2 after release PR6.

----
The Symfony2 sandbox application is a great base to start digging into writing Symfony2 apps. When I tried to get my first overview of how to build an app with Symfony2 I just downloaded the symfony2-sandbox from https://github.com/symfony/symfony-sandbox/archives/master and extracted it somewhere onto my development machine, lets assume our folder is sven@dev:~/sandbox$

Prerequisites:

Git installed, check

Hello Git, how are you :)

Create a new local git repository with git init:
(No need now for a remote repository)
sven@dev:~/sandbox$ git init

Goodbye vendors, Hello vendors!

SVN had svn-externals, Git has submodules, so we can make our lives a little bit easier and make use of git submodules to include all vendors as independent git repositories, called submodules. To achieve this we have to execute the command git submodule add <repository-url> <checkout-directory>.
Just execute the following list line by line on your command line:

sven@dev:~/sandbox$

git submodule add git://github.com/symfony/symfony.git           vendor/symfony
git submodule add git://github.com/fabpot/Twig.git               vendor/twig
git submodule add git://github.com/fabpot/Twig-extensions.git    vendor/twig-extensions
git submodule add git://github.com/doctrine/common.git           vendor/doctrine-common
git submodule add git://github.com/doctrine/doctrine2.git        vendor/doctrine
git submodule add git://github.com/doctrine/dbal.git             vendor/doctrine-dbal
git submodule add git://github.com/doctrine/data-fixtures.git    vendor/doctrine-data-fixtures
git submodule add git://github.com/doctrine/migrations.git       vendor/doctrine-migrations
git submodule add git://github.com/doctrine/mongodb.git          vendor/doctrine-mongodb
git submodule add git://github.com/doctrine/mongodb-odm.git      vendor/doctrine-mongodb-odm
git submodule add git://github.com/swiftmailer/swiftmailer.git   vendor/swiftmailer
git submodule add git://github.com/zendframework/zf2.git         vendor/zend

Now you have included every dependency to a vendor as a seperate git repository, now just call git submodule update --init to update everything.
sven@dev:~/sandbox$ git submodule update --init

You like it slow?

Symfony2 has a bootstrap file under ~/sandbox/vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/HttpKernel/bootstrap.php which includes the whole framework for maximum performance, so it never loads the real classes under vendor/symfony/src/Symfony, for debugging and testing it can be useful to include the real classes and not the bootstrap file, for this you need to change two files:

1: sven@dev:~/sandbox/app/bootstrap.php

Comment out the line:
require_once __DIR__.'/../vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/HttpKernel/bootstrap.php';

2: sven@dev:~/sandbox/app/autoload.php

Add at the beginning of the file the following line:
require_once(__DIR__ . '/../vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/ClassLoader/UniversalClassLoader.php');

More to delete, just to be up to date

Delete the contents of sven@dev:~/sandbox/bin$ and create a new folder called ant-tasks and a new file called update-vendors.xml. Paste the following content into the file:

<project name="update-vendors" basedir="./../../">
    
    <target name="update-doctrine">
        <exec dir="${basedir}/vendor/doctrine" executable="git" failonerror="true">
            <arg line="pull" />
        </exec>
    </target>
    
    <target name="update-doctrine-common">
        <exec dir="${basedir}/vendor/doctrine-common" executable="git" failonerror="true">
            <arg line="pull" />
        </exec>
    </target>
    
    <target name="update-doctrine-dbal">
        <exec dir="${basedir}/vendor/doctrine-dbal" executable="git" failonerror="true">
            <arg line="pull" />
        </exec>
    </target>
    
    <target name="update-doctrine-data-fixtures">
        <exec dir="${basedir}/vendor/doctrine-data-fixtures" executable="git" failonerror="true">
            <arg line="pull" />
        </exec>
    </target>
    
    <target name="update-doctrine-migrations">
        <exec dir="${basedir}/vendor/doctrine-migrations" executable="git" failonerror="true">
            <arg line="pull" />
        </exec>
    </target>
    
    <target name="update-doctrine-mongodb">
        <exec dir="${basedir}/vendor/doctrine-mongodb" executable="git" failonerror="true">
            <arg line="pull" />
        </exec>
    </target>
    
    <target name="update-doctrine-mongodb-odm">
        <exec dir="${basedir}/vendor/doctrine-mongodb-odm" executable="git" failonerror="true">
            <arg line="pull" />
        </exec>
    </target>
    
    <target name="update-symfony">
        <exec dir="${basedir}/vendor/symfony" executable="git" failonerror="true">
            <arg line="pull" />
        </exec>
    </target>
    
    <target name="update-twig">
        <exec dir="${basedir}/vendor/twig" executable="git" failonerror="true">
            <arg line="pull" />
        </exec>
    </target>
    
    <target name="update-twig-extensions">
        <exec dir="${basedir}/vendor/twig-extensions" executable="git" failonerror="true">
            <arg line="pull" />
        </exec>
    </target>
    
    <target name="update-swiftmailer">
        <exec dir="${basedir}/vendor/swiftmailer" executable="git" failonerror="true">
            <arg line="pull" />
        </exec>
    </target>
    
    <target name="update-zend">
        <exec dir="${basedir}/vendor/zend" executable="git" failonerror="true">
            <arg line="pull" />
        </exec>
    </target>
</project>

This file is an ant tasks file, you can execute the tasks described in there with ant to update your vendors.

Done

Now make your sandbox folder accessible by your webserver and navigate to the web folder and open the app.php or app_dev.php file in your browser, Symfony2 should running without any problems.

Another tip about git submodules

Sometimes it's a bit dangerous to get the most bleeding edge checkouts from the vendors, so you can update the sources/submodules and after that, navigate into the checkout folder and switch to a tag with git checkout <tag_name>.

Doctrine in the Real World - Presentation from Symfony Live 2011

2011-02-10T09:25:00.004+01:00

Doctrine in the Real World

View more presentations from Jonathan Wage.

The Path to Symfony in the USA- Presentation from Symfony Live 2011

2011-02-10T09:21:00.004+01:00

The Path to Symfony in the USA

View more presentations from Dustin Whittle.

Symfony2 from the Trenches - Presentation from Symfony Live 2011

2011-02-10T09:18:00.005+01:00

Symfony2 from the Trenches

View more presentations from Jonathan Wage.

Being Dangerous with Twig - Presentation from Symfony Live 2011

2011-02-10T09:14:00.002+01:00

Being Dangerous with Twig

View more presentations from Ryan Weaver.

Form naming

2011-02-09T14:11:00.004+01:00

Here is a short note, never forget to give your Form a name when calling Form::create:

# inside your controller

    public function formAction()
    {
        $context = $this->get('form.context');
        $request = $this->get('request');

        $form = MyForm::create($context, 'myform'); // 2nd parameter is the name of the form
        $form->bind($request);
  
        
        return $this->render('MyBundle:Index:form.html.twig', array(
            'form' => $form
        ));
    }

If you forget to pass a name the automatic token check will report everytime an error after submission.

Translate form labels inside Twig templates

2011-02-09T12:38:00.002+01:00

In this exmaple I assume you've a configured transaltion service up and running. This tip works when you're iterate over loops, like in this example and/or when you print everything out by hand ({{ form_label(form.my_field, label) }}).

{% block someblock %}
    <form action="#" method="post" {{ form_enctype(form) }}>
        {{ form_errors(form) }}

        {% for field in form %}
            {% if not field.ishidden %}
                <div>
                    <!-- translates the field name (stored in key) and saves it in the variable label -->
                    {% set label %}{% trans field.key %}{% endset %}   
                    
                    <!-- passes the translated name as the second parameter for your own label -->
                    {{ form_label(field, label) }}

                    {{ form_errors(field) }}
                    {{ form_field(field) }}
                </div>
            {% endif %}
        {% endfor %}

        {{ form_hidden(form) }}
        <input type="submit" />
    </form>
{% endblock %}

Dependency injection for Controllers

2011-02-09T11:52:00.009+01:00

To get dependency injection working properbly for controllers in your Symfony2 bundles you have to take care of several things, let's start with an example service configuration:

Service config

# src/MyBundle/Resources/config/config.yml

services: 
  view: 
    class: "MyBundle\View"
    shared: true
    arguments: 
      container: "@service_container"
        
  my_bundle_controller_index: 
    class:  "MyBundle\Controller\IndexController"
    shared: true
    arguments: 
      view: "@view"
    calls:
      - [ setContainer, ["@service_container"] ]

The name of the controller service is my_controller_bundle_index.
By default your routing.(yml|xml|php) file would look like this:

# src/MyBundle/Resources/config/routing.yml

my_bundle_route:  
  pattern: my/bundle/route  
  defaults: 
    _controller: MyBundle:IndexController:indexAction

Your service configuration is properly loaded via your dependency injection extension (src/MyBundle/DependencyExtension/MyExtension.php) but nothing happens, why? In your routing file you have to specifiy the controller with his service name (my_bundle_controller_index) and not his bundle namepath. Change your routing file to:

# src/MyBundle/Resources/config/routing.yml

my_bundle_route:  
  pattern: my/bundle/route  
  defaults: 
    _controller: my_bundle_controller_index:indexAction // not: MyBundle:IndexController

Now everything should work, besides there are some more things you should know:

Your controller should implement the interface ContainerAware or the base symfony2 controller class symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\Controller
Your dependency injection extension should load all required configuration files (especially the one with the service vonfiguration)

Your bundle routes are registered in the app/config/routing.(yml|xml|php):

# app/config/routing.yml

my_bundle:
    resource: "@MyBundle/Resources/config/routing.yml"

You loaded your bundle config in your app/config(_%environment%).(yml|xml|php):

# app/config.yml

my_bundle.config: ~