PHP

Symfony Review-1

Framework, PHP, Symfony

I have been trying out Symfony today, and while I was working on it, I faced some difficulties and issues.
I decided to leave some progress review on this.

Installing Symfony

This is simple if you follow the official guide. But one thing to remember: symfony command might NOT work if you don’t turn off & on your terminal. Mine didn’t. If your command doesn’t work, turn your terminal off & on again.

symfony new [projectName]

Should be enough to create your new project. Do NOT forget to change your root in nginx.conf file (If you are doing this on a nginx web server).

The console

Symfony can be managed by its own console and its commands, such as running its server or checking status, etc.

  • Useful commands
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    //check routed url list
    php bin/console debug:router
    //refresh cache
     php bin/console cache:clear --env=prod

File Directory

  • src-AppBundle contains Controller.
  • Resources-views contains view files.
    Which are two main places where you might want to begin.

Twig engine

Symfony uses html twig engine for its view as long as I have seen. I skimmed through the configs, and it seems like different rendering engine can be chosen, but this is interesting for me. So far, PHP frameworks that I used had plain HTMLs as its view templates.

Routing

Routing is quite different from that of CI or Drupal, which are frameworks that I am familiar with. It uses a sort of annotation, which looks like the following

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/**
 * @Route("/happy/name")
 */

This defines url pattern. But I think the file name and controller / function names are correlated since I got many errors while trying to get this work, and it seemed like the file name and function names must be right.
This might be a mistake, so I’ll try to update if it turns out differently.

Unresolved Issues (trying to find out)

  • I am having issues (or this might not be an issue) with cache. From the beginning, when I was trying to see if my page has changed after changing some parts in index.html.twig, it didn’t change.
    Newly added controller wasn’t recognized too, until I did this:

    php bin/console cache:clear –no-warmup –env=prod

I’m not sure if this is something that I must do every time I do some changes. There might be some way, so I’ll keep on searching.

  • Debugging
    It said debugging toolbar should show up, but I haven’t seen it yet :(
    I think I might have set up something wrong, and trying to figure this out.
    update!
    ==> I found this out. My website seems like it’s on a production mode instead of development mode. I accessed app_dev.php by explicitly using its url, and the bar showed up.
    I think this is because of my web server setting, which is not the built-in php server. I’ll have to check up a bit more.

  • Dev & Prod
    I think Symfony divides these two quite strictly. I’m still trying to find out the exact mechanism, but there are two files -app.php and app_dev.php. While I was setting up nginx.conf, it also separated these two environments, which is good. But I should take more in-depth look to see exact settings and usages.

  • Memory issue
    While I was trying to install FOS\rest-bundle, I encountered memory issue. Allocated memory exceeded, so I tried to increase the memory_limit parameter in php.ini file to 1G, but it didn’t work.
    I though there might be another issue, but today I tried it again by putting -1 as its value. As a result, the memory alert was gone but now I had allocation exception in Composer. This was solved after I entered few commands suggested here

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