Symfony is a framework broadly recognized for its quality, reliability and ability to drive large enterprise projects. But for the last few years, Symfony has also gained many features to develop faster, and to refactor more easily. Symfony 4 offers major improvements in this area that will deeply change the way we build applications.
Let’s talk about:
Symfony 4 main concepts and new features: micro-framework by default, 12-factor app, new components …
Flex, the new and powerful Symfony installer that can also automatically install and configure libraries and bundles
Symfony 4’s new simplified (and “bundle-less”) directory structure
The autowiring (now enabled by default), which allows the automatic injection of dependencies without having to write any configuration (no more YAML and XML)
The revamped controllers mechanism
Webpack Encore, the first Symfony component ever written in JavaScript, designed to easily integrate JavaScript and CSS tools in a PHP project
The official integrations of the Doctrine (ORM), API Platform (API) and EasyAdmin libraries (admin generator)
How to easily use Symfony 4 with Docker from dev to cloud deployment with a dedicated skeleton
You’ll learn how to leverage Symfony for large projects, prototypes, small applications and even your “weekend projects”, and how to migrate from smallest to the largest.
A few months ago, I’ve contributed a new component to Symfony: WebLink. By implementing cutting edge web standards, namely HTTP/2 Server Push and W3C’s Resource Hints, it brings great opportunities to boost webapp’s performance.
Thanks to Symfony WebLink, HTTP/2 (h2) servers are able to push resources to clients before they even know that they need them (think to CSS or JavaScript files, or relations of an API resource). WebLink also enables other very efficient optimisations that work with HTTP 1:
telling the browser to fetch or to render another webpage in the background ;
init early DNS lookups, TCP handshakes or TLS negotiations
Let’s discover how easy it is to use it and the real life benefits you can expect. The WebLink components is available since Symfony 3.3 (it means you can start to use it today), but in this article I’ll use Symfony 4 to celebrate the release of its first beta yesterday!
Open https://localhost, if this nice page appears, you successfully created your first Symfony 4 project and are browsing it in HTTP/2!Let’s create a very simple homepage using the Twig templating engine. Because Symfony Flex starts as a micro framework, the first step is to install the library itself: docker-compose exec app composer req twig (run this in a new shell)
Flex is smart enough to download Twig, automatically register it into Symfony and enable Symfony features requiring the library. It also generates a base HTML5 layout in the templates/ directory (we will not use it but you should).
Clear the cache: docker-compose exec app bin/console c:c (this step will become optional when #24642 will be merged)
Refresh your browser, this nice HP should appear:
2 HTTP requests are issued by the browser, one for the homepage, and another one for Bootstrap.
But we know from the very beginning that the browser will need Bootstrap. Instead of waiting that the browser download the homepage, parse the HTML (notice “Initiator: Parser” in Chrome DevTools), encounter the reference to bootstrap.min.css and finally send a new HTTP request, we could take benefit of the HTTP/2 Push feature to directly send both resources to the browser. Let’s do it!
Install the WebLink component: docker-compose exec app composer req weblink
As for Twig, Flex will automatically download and register this component into our app.
Now, update the template to use the preload Twig helper that leverages the WebLink component:
Reload the page:As you can see (Initiator: Push), both responses have been sent directly by the server. bootstrap.min.css has started to be received before the browser even requested it!
How does it works?
The WebLink component tracks Link HTTP headers to add to the response. When using the preload() helper, a Link header with a preloadrel attribute is added to the response:
According to the Preload specification, when a HTTP/2 server detects that the original (HTTP 1) response contains this HTTP header, it will automatically trigger a push for the related file in the same HTTP/2 connection.
The Apache server provided by my Docker setup supports this feature. It’s why Bootstrap is pushed to the client! Popular proxy services and CDN including Cloudflare, Fastly and Akamai also leverage this feature. It means that you can push resources to clients and improve performance of your apps in production right now! All you need is Symfony 3.3+ and a compatible web server (the free version of Nginx doesn’t support Server Push) or CDN service.
If you want to prevent the push but let the browser preload the resource by issuing an early separate HTTP request, use the nopush attribute:
In addition to HTTP/2 Push and preloading, the WebLink component also provide some helpers to send Resource Hints to clients, the following helpers are available:
dns_prefetch: “indicate an origin that will be used to fetch required resources, and that the user agent should resolve as early as possible”
preconnect: “indicate an origin that will be used to fetch required resources. Initiating an early connection, which includes the DNS lookup, TCP handshake, and optional TLS negotiation, allows the user agent to mask the high latency costs of establishing a connection”
prefetch: “identify a resource that might be required by the next navigation, and that the user agent should fetch, such that the user agent can deliver a faster response once the resource is requested in the future”
prerender: “identify a resource that might be required by the next navigation, and that the user agent should fetch and execute, such that the user agent can deliver a faster response once the resource is requested in the future”
It is already as a standalone library by the Bolt CMS. While we’re speaking about interoperability, WebLink can deal with any link implementing PSR-13.
Thanks to Symfony WebLink, there is no excuses to not to switch to HTTP/2!
Learn more about these new features in the relevant Pull Requets: #22273 and #21478.
Your Symfony app is slow? Contact Les-Tilleuls.coop, we can help you make it fast!
At Les-Tilleuls.coop, we use Slack to centralize our communications and notifications. And, as the maintainers of the API Platform framework, we also do our best to help the community on StackOverflow when we have some free time. Until recently we were just checking periodically the StackOverflow website for new questions. But because all our notifications (GitHub, Travis, Twitter…) except the one from StackOverflow were centralized on Slack, it wasn’t optimal.
So I created a tiny Slack bot (just 150 LOC) to monitor StackOverflow (or any other site from the StackExchange galaxy) and automatically post new questions in dedicated Slack channels.
This bot is written in Go, the source code (MIT licensed) as well as binaries are available on GitHub. A Docker image is also available to easily run the daemon locally or on your servers.
You can monitor as many SO tags as you want, and map and choose in which Slack channel questions must be posted.
Last but not least, if you rely on Kubernetes to manage your servers (or, as we do, use Google Container Engine), you can install Stack to Slack in a single command thanks to the provided Helm chart:
Clone the Git repository:
git clonegit@github.com:dunglas/stack2slack.git
Install the provided chart:
helm install--set slackApiToken=<your-API-token>--set tagToChannel.stackExchangeTag=slackChannel./chart/stack2slack
I’ll speak at a lot of conferences until the end of this year, mostly about API Platform and Symfony 4. Here is my schedule:
September, 22: Symfony Live London API Platform – full stack framework reboot (english)
We’ll start by creating a fully-featured API in just a few minutes with API Platform, Symfony and Doctrine. The API will support pagination, data validation, access control, relation embedding, filters and error handling. It will expose many formats (JSON-LD, Hydra, JSONAPI, HAL, JSON, XML, YAML and CSV), will be documented with Swagger/OpenAPI and will have a nice UI done in React. Last but not least, the API will respond in a just few milliseconds thanks to its builtin invalidation based cache mechanism.
Then, we will use the ReactJS tools provided by the API Platform to consume the exposed Hydra documentation. In a few more minutes, we will get a Material Design administration interface (a la Sonata / EasyAdmin – but 100% client-side) built with React. Finally, we’ll discover 2 nice code generators to bootstrap a SPA (React, Redux and React Router) and iOS and Android mobile apps (React Native).
September, 27: Paris API API Platform – full stack framework reboot (english)
October, 26: Forum PHP Paris (french) Développer plus rapidement avec Symfony 4
Symfony est un framework universellement reconnu pour sa qualité, sa fiabilité et sa capacité à propulser les gros projets “entreprise”. Mais depuis quelques années, Symfony s’est également doté de nombreuses fonctionnalités permettant de développer toujours plus rapidement des applications web. Symfony 4 propose des améliorations majeures dans ce domaine grâce à une refonte profonde de la configuration par défaut du framework qui va changer profondément la manière dont nous développons des applications. Au cours de cette présentation, j’aborderai :
Les grands concepts et les nouveautés de Symfony 4: micr-framework par défaut, 12-factor app, nouveaux composants…
Flex, le nouvel installateur surpuissant de Symfony qui peut également installer et configurer automatiquement bibliothèques et bundles
La nouvelle structure de répertoire simplifiée (et sans bundle) de Symfony 4
L’autowiring (qui est désormais activé par défaut), qui permet l’injection automatique des dépendances sans avoir à écrire aucune configuration (fini le YAML et le XML)
Le système de contrôleurs, amélioré et assaini
“Encore”, le nouveau système de gestion des assets (JS, CSS) basé sur Webpack
Les intégrations officielles des bibliothèques Doctrine (ORM), API Platform (API Rest) et EasyAdmin (générateur d’admin)
Comment utiliser facilement Symfony 4 avec Docker du poste de dev jusqu’au déploiement dans le Cloud, grâce à un squelette dédié
A la fin de ce talk, vous saurez comment utiliser Symfony aussi bien pour vos gros projets que pour vos prototypes, vos petites applications et vos “week-end projects”, tout en vous permettant de basculer d’un mode à l’autre.
November, 14: SymfonyCon Cluj Workshop: getting Started with API Platform (english)
API Plaftorm has become a very popular framework to build advanced and modern API-first web projects with Symfony. This tool will help you to ease the creation of your REST API web projects thanks to its powerful toolkit that includes the following features: schema.org support, linked data, data validation, pagination, filtering, sorting, etc.
November, 16: SymfonyCon Cluj API Platform – full stack framework reboot (english)
November, 22: SemWeb.Pro (french) API Platform : le web sémantique pour les masses
API Platform est un framework web qui propose des outils très simple à prendre en main pour créer et consommer des API Linked Data supportant nativement JSON-LD, Hydra et Schema.org.
Cette solution totalement open source (license MIT) est basée sur les technologies familière pour les développeurs web : PHP (et le framework Symfony) et JavaScript (et ReactJS).
Nous découvrirons comment importer un modèle de données depuis Schema.org, l’exposer via une API web compatible Linked Data (via JSON-LD) et l’adapter grâce au framework Symfony.
Cette API sera 100% fonctionnelle, et elle supportera la validation, la pagination, les filtres, l’imbrication de ressources, sera documentée via Swagger et Hydra et disposera d’une interface graphique orientée développeur.
Nous découvrirons ensuite les outils frontend du projet :
Un système d’administration complet (à la Sonata), construit automatiquement en découvrant l’API et bénéficiant d’une interface moderne (Material Design) basée sur React et Redux
Un générateur de code permettant de créer des interfaces webapp ReactJS et applications mobiles React Native.
Symfony 4 is all about making the developer life easier. You liked using SF for large and robust apps, you’ll love using it for your next MVP, prototype or small project.
This presentation was followed by a live coding session (not recorded, unfortunately).
API Platform is a framework designed to make the creation of API-based information systems easier. It provides server-side tooling to create modern hypermedia and Linked Data APIs in just a few minutes. This new version introduces client-side tools to bootstrap Single-Page Applications using ReactJS by consuming the autogenerated documentation of the API.
The changelog is huge, more than 200 commits by dozens of developers have been merged. I think we can say that this release will be great!
Let’s review the most interesting new features. If you just want to try it, the demo has been upgraded to use this new version and you can download it on GitHub.
It means that any API Platform API can now have an admin for free! The admin is fully customizable, a follow up post will come.
A React/Redux Webapp Generator
The admin is dynamic, no code generation happens. But sometimes it’s interesting to be able to generate some code to bootstrap a project. It’s exactly what the new api-platform-generate-crud tool does. It parses the Hydra documentation and generates a basic ReactJS webapp with the following features:
generation of the suitable HTML5 input type (number, date…) according to the type of the API property
display of the server-side validation errors under the related input (if using API Platform Core)
client-side validation (required attributes)
the generated HTML is compatible with Bootstrap and includes mandatory classes
the generated HTML code is accessible to people with disabilities (ARIA support)
the Redux and the React Router configuration is also generated
Thanks to Piotr Synowiec for his contributions and fixes to those frontend tools!
Builtin HTTP Cache Invalidation System
Exposing a hypermedia API has many advantages. One of them is the ability to know exactly which resources are included in HTTP responses created by the API. We used this specificity to make API Platform apps blazing fast.
When the new cache mechanism is enabled, API Platform collects identifiers of every resources included in a given HTTP response (including lists, embedded documents and subresources) and returns them in a special HTTP header called Cache-Tags.
A cache reverse proxy supporting cache tags (Varnish, CloudFlare, Fastly…) must be put in front of the web server and store all responses returned by the API with a high TTL. When a resource is modified, API Platform takes care of purging all responses containing it in the proxy’s cache. It means that after the first request, all subsequent requests will not touch the web server, and will be served instantly from the cache. It also means that the content served will always be fresh, because the cache is purged in real time.
The support for most specific cases such as the invalidation of collections when a document is added or removed or for relationships and inverse relations is built-in.
We also included Varnish in the Docker setup provided with the distribution of API Platform, so this new feature works out of the box.
Integration with Varnish and the Doctrine ORM is shipped with the core library. You can easily implement the support for any other proxy or persistence system.
A detailed blogpost about this feature will follow.
Per Resource Authorization Mechanism
Thanks to the API Platform’s events and the extension system, it was already easy to configure basic authorization rules. In the version 2.1, we introduced an easy way to configure fine grained authorization rules directly from resource classes.
In the following example, only the logged in admins can access all operations related to the SecuredResource. However, regular users owning a specific resource can also access it:
Under the hood, this new feature uses Symfony’s access control expressions. The object variable value is the current resource (or collection of resources) while the user variable contains an instance of the Symfony’s user currently logged in.
Subresources Support
Having the ability to expose subresources was one of the most requested features. It was already possible to use such URL patterns thanks to custom operations, but it was a bit complicated to do.
Fortunately Antoine Bluchet rolled up this sleeves and did an excellent job! As of API Platform 2.1, subresources are a first class citizen:
PHP
1
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/**
* @ApiResource
*/
classProduct{
/**
* @ApiSubresource
*/
public$reviews;
}
The previous snippet is enough to expose through
http://example.com/products/1/reviews the list of RelatedDummies resources related to the Dummy #1.
The documentations will also reflect the availability of this new URL.
New Filters
API Platform comes with 3 new useful filters that you will love.
property_filter
Baptiste Meyer contributed 2 of them. The first one,
api_platform.serializer.property_filter, lets the client specify which properties the API must return.
When a resource is configured to use it, you can use the URL
/products/1?properties[]=price&properties[]=currency to only serialize the properties “foo” and “bar” of this entity (all other properties will be ignored).
It’s also possible to list the properties of embedded resources with the following format:
/products/1?properties[]=price&properties[brand][]=name.
group_filter
The second one,
api_platform.serializer.group_filter is similar, but instead of choosing properties one by one, you can pass a list of serialization groups to apply using a URL like:
/products/1?groups[]=detailed.
Those two filters allow to easily reduce the size of the returned resources to only include relevant data.
exists_filter
The last new filter,
api_platform.doctrine.orm.exists_filter, was contributed by Teoh Han Hui. It allows to filter a collection on the existence of a specified value:
/products?brand[exists]=0.
A Revamped API Doc UI
API Platform has a nice UI built with Swagger UI that is available for every URL of the API when requesting it from a browser (or any client sending a
Accept:text/html HTTP header). In API Platform 2.1, we upgraded Swagger UI to its new major version (3.0), a full rewrite in ReactJS (API Platform + React = ❤️) including a bunch of UX improvements.
Laury Sorriaux took this opportunity to propose a great custom stylesheet improving the overall user experience and respecting our color scheme. It also contains an animation featuring our cute spider (he will get a name soon, stay tuned)!
Last but not least, Daniel Kiesel contributed to improve the integration with OAuth (and FOSOAuthBundle): it’s now possible to login with OAuth from the UI by just adding a few lines of config.
Brand New Docker Setup
One of the coolest features of API Platform 2 was the ability to run the app locally by just typing
docker-compose up and to deploy apps in a breath with Kubernetes or Docker Swarm.
In API Platform 2.1, we dramatically improved the Docker support:
All images are now using Alpine Linux (reduce the size, improve the security)
Nginx and PHP-FPM are now used instead of Apache and mod_php
Varnish has been added (see the section about the cache invalidation mechanism)
The Docker Compose file has been upgraded to the format v3
Many compatibility problems with Windows have been fixed
The performance when using Docker for Mac or Docker for Windows has been dramatically improved
This Docker setup supports any Symfony-based application. Just copy/paste it in your Symfony project.
Improving the Docker configuration was a hard and collaborative work. I want to especially thanks Jacques Lefebvre, Teoh Han Hui and Antoine Bluchet for the large numbers of hours they spent to make this possible.
Integration in Symfony Flex
You can’t have missed it, Symfony 4 will come with an exciting tool to install and manage your projects: Symfony Flex. API Platform is already officially supported by Flex and can’t be easier to install: just type
composer req api
Fabien Potencier (the creator of Symfony) recorded a screencast showing how API Platform and Flex fit well together:
Impressive isn’t it? Flex only works with API Platform 2.1+. Older versions aren’t supported.
Of course, many other new features, fixes and improvements (especially regarding performance) have been merged, you can read the full changelog to learn more.
Next steps before the stable release:
Testing, testing and testing again. Please try the new features, upgrade your existing projects and run your tests suites against this new version! Report any problem on GitHub. It’s very very helpful to us!
Update the documentation and write new articles for the new features. They are already many pull requests opened, reviewing and improving them is much appreciated.
I’ll present some new features of Symfony 4 (including Symfony Flex) at the next Lille’s sfPot in Thursday, June 22 (event to be announced soon)
Here is the abstract of the API Platform talk (in french but slides will be in english):
Au cours de ce talk, je présenterai comment créer très facilement une API web de qualité, une webapp (SPA) et une app mobile à l’aide du framework Open Source API Platform (PHP).
API Platform permet d’exposer une API REST (niveau 3) 100% fonctionnelle juste en décrivant son modèle de données ou en l’important depuis Schema.org.
Nous découvrirons réaliserons sans effort une API supportant :
les opérations REST (lecture et écriture)
la validation de données
la pagination
les tris et les filtres
une documentation Swagger générée automatiquement et une interface graphique d’administration
un système de gestion de droit utilisateur
un mécanisme de cache HTTP par invalidation
la négociation de contenu
l’imbrication de documents
De plus, notre API supportera directement les formats hypermedia modernes tels que JSON-LD, Hydra et HAL qui facilitent l’intéropérabilité des systèmes (Linked Data, web sémantique).
Grâce à Docker, notre API se lance en un instant et peut être déployée en un instant dans les “clouds”.
Une fois notre API construite, nous utiliserons les outils fournis par API Platform pour générer une interface d’administration complète, une SPA et une app mobile basés sur React JS grâce à la description hypermedia de l’API.
Learn how to use API Platform and Symfony to create super easily rich web and mobile applications relying on React (JS) for their presentational layer.
In just a few minutes, we will create a hypermedia API thanks to API Platform, Symfony and Doctrine. We will do it step by step, and the API will be 100% functional with support for pagination, validation, filters, resources embedding. The API will be automatically documented using Swagger and Hydra and beautiful user interface for developers will be available. HTTP cache, authorization and authentication can then be added in a breath.
Then, we will introduce all new client-side tools for API Platform:
A fully featured JavaScript (Single Page App) administration system with a modern user interface (Material Design) ; built on top of Admin On Rest (React and Redux). This admin is builded dynamically thanks to the API discoverability (Hydra).
A raw React, Redux and React Router code generator to bootstrap fully-featured Single Page Applications and native mobile apps thanks to the API documentation exposed by API Platform (client-side and server-side validation, on fields error, Twitter Bootstrap compatibility, a11y support…)
API Platform is new open source PHP framework dedicated to the creation of modern web APIs.
It allows to bootstrap a fully featured API (pagination, validation, filtering, sorting, automatically generated documentation, HTTP cache, OAuth and JWT auth…) in just a few minutes.
It exposes out of the box popular API formats including Swagger, JSON-LD, Hydra, HAL, JSONAPI and Schema.org.
It is extensible and can be specialized with ease. Because it is built on top of the industry-leading Symfony framework, it already counts hundreds of available extensions (bundles).
In this talk, I’ll show how to create a hypermedia API in just a few lines of codes, then take a look to the main features of the framework.
