Introducing the Official Symfony Best Practices

October 9, 2014 • Published by Javier Eguiluz

Fabien Potencier, the leader of the Symfony project, introduced today a new initiative called The Official Symfony Best Practices. During his Symfony Live New York keynote, Fabien briefly described the reason for unveiling this initiative:

Since the publication of Symfony 2.0, the Symfony Community has created an unofficial set of recommendations for developing Symfony2 applications. Unfortunately, a lot of these recommendations are unneeded for web applications. Much of the time, they unnecessarily overcomplicate things and don't follow the original pragmatic philosophy of Symfony.

Fabien, alongside Ryan Weaver`_ and `Javier Eguiluz`_, has compiled 31 of these best practices in a handbook that will be published for free in the coming days at `symfony.com/best-practices.

We know that old habits die hard and some of you will be shocked by some of these best-practices. But by following these, you'll be able to develop apps faster, with less complexity and with the same or even higher quality.

In any case, keep in mind that these are optional recommendations that you and your team may or may not follow to develop Symfony applications. If you want to continue using your own best-practices and methodologies, you can of course do it. Symfony is flexible enough to adapt to your needs. That will never change.

Published in #Documentation #Symfony

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Comments

Artem Ostretsov said on Oct 9, 2014 at 14:02

This is the most expected docs as for me. Thank you!

Artem Ostretsov said on Oct 9, 2014 at 14:02

This is the most expected docs as for me. Thank you!

Maarten Dubelaar said on Oct 9, 2014 at 14:14

Great! So we'll finally get an official best practice on the 'controllers as service' discussion ;-)

Ariel Ferrandini said on Oct 9, 2014 at 14:20

Thanks! This book will help teams to work better ;)

Aldo Chiecchia said on Oct 9, 2014 at 16:03

Excellent news Javier, this is something that will be very useful for both new and seasoned Symfony developers.

Jeroen Thora said on Oct 9, 2014 at 17:39

Great news!

Hoffmann András said on Oct 9, 2014 at 18:21

juhuuu

Alex Joyce said on Oct 10, 2014 at 01:03

Thanks, but what's with the wait?

Javier Eguiluz Certified said on Oct 10, 2014 at 05:51

@Alex, the wait is needed to allow us for the last minute tweaks. We need to test everything well. Thanks for your patience!

Pera Jovic said on Oct 10, 2014 at 07:45

#10

That would be great. Big thanks!

mehrez87 said on Oct 10, 2014 at 09:17

#11

is there a french version ?

Sierj Khaletski said on Oct 10, 2014 at 09:19

#12

Thnx for nice news! So we'll finally get an official best practice on the 'controllers as service' discussion +1 )

Pablo Godel said on Oct 11, 2014 at 19:27

#13

Great initiative! There will be no controllers as services :)

Luuk Scholten said on Oct 11, 2014 at 20:54

#14

Really excited for this! Thanks for the effort Javier, Ryan and Fabien :)

Michael Sivolobov said on Oct 13, 2014 at 07:15

#15

I'm logged in with SensioLabsConnect but link is still not available.

Piotr Karszny said on Oct 13, 2014 at 07:22

#16

Can't download too..

Wojciech Gucik said on Oct 13, 2014 at 07:24

#17

Yup, link not working, shows Login with SensioLabConnect even after you logged in.

ibasaw said on Oct 13, 2014 at 07:27

#18

wait for the link ;)

Sebastiaan Stok Certified said on Oct 13, 2014 at 07:28

#19

Same here.. Can't download.

Loïc Vernet Certified said on Oct 13, 2014 at 07:54

#20

Michal Mičko said on Oct 13, 2014 at 08:07

#21

Same problem. After login I can't download.

Aleksander Cyrkulewski said on Oct 13, 2014 at 08:08

#22

Can not download also, see same button about registration

Sergio de Candelario said on Oct 13, 2014 at 08:22

#23

Same here, can't download.

Jeroen van Leeuwen said on Oct 13, 2014 at 08:29

#24

Same here, hoping it will be fixed soon..

Yoh said on Oct 13, 2014 at 09:15

#25

Same here :(

Yuriy Levin said on Oct 13, 2014 at 09:21

#26

Link is working!!!

Yuriy Levin said on Oct 13, 2014 at 09:21

#27

http://symfony.com/doc/download-best-practices-book/

nyro said on Oct 13, 2014 at 09:43

#28

Great work! BTW, it writes we should use parameters.dist.yml but the default is to use parameters.yml.dist.

Matthew Thomas said on Oct 13, 2014 at 13:55

#29

Really enjoying the read, noticed a typo on page 24 $postSlug but in the array you use $slug

Javier Eguiluz Certified said on Oct 13, 2014 at 16:31

#30

Thank you all for reporting these errors and typos. We've fixed all of them and we'll publish a new version of the document very soon.

Meanwhile, you can report new errors and typos here: https://github.com/symfony/symfony-docs/issues/4321

Peter Kokot said on Oct 13, 2014 at 22:17

#31

This is really great and nice of you to share it to the community. Very useful. Thank you.

webDEVILopers said on Oct 15, 2014 at 07:51

#32

I don't know if it is my PDF reader but copy & paste on text blocks will always result in new lines per word. Maybe this can be changed to make it easier to copy content e.g. for my private wiki.

Ghost said on Oct 15, 2014 at 11:13

#33

A couple of issues:

$ php app/console generate:bundle --namespace=AppBundle --dir=src --format=annotation --no-interaction This command does not work. It throws an error saying that bundles should be prefixed(like Acme\AppBundle or so).

If you move templates to the app/Resources/views and the delete your bundle's views directory, you get an Twig_Loader error.

I've tried this on a 2.6@dev installation.

Ghost said on Oct 15, 2014 at 11:14

#34

Other than that - perfect! Very useful!

Javier Eguiluz Certified said on Oct 15, 2014 at 16:41

#35

@webDEVILopers we're sorry about the PDF issues. If you prefer a text format, the contents of the book have just been committed to the documentation repository: https://github.com/symfony/symfony-docs/pull/4327

@Vladislav, you are right about the error when generating bundles without a vendor. There is a PR that fixes this and that it will be merged soon: https://github.com/sensiolabs/SensioGeneratorBundle/pull/299

Regarding the Twig error, refactoring an application is always going to introduce errors. What you should check is that templates have been moved to the app/Resources/views/, that all template references have been updated (in controllers and in include(), extends and embed Twig tags) and then, make sure to clear the cache (probably by executing: rm -fr app/cache*)

Ghost said on Oct 15, 2014 at 19:00

#36

Maybe, I didn't explain correcly :) Deleting the "views" directory from a bundle throws the error, not the refactoring itself. I suppose, the bundle expects the "views" directory to be there.

It's easy to reproduce this. Rename or remove the "views" directory of a bundle and you'll get:

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Twig_Error_Loader' with message 'The "/Users/vladislav/Sites/sfplayground/src/AppBundle/Resources/views" directory does not exist.' in /Users/vladislav/Sites/weemss/vendor/twig/twig/lib/Twig/Loader/Filesystem.php on line 93

Ghost said on Oct 15, 2014 at 19:02

#37

Clearing the dev cache fixed that. Sorry. My bad :)

Denis said on Oct 16, 2014 at 00:43

#38

Excellent initiative!

I think that Symfony3 is going to encourage developers to adopt more of interoperability each others while Symfony2 wished to bring too much freedom (for noble causes).

It's very useful for third-party bundles and submitted experimental bundles.

I shall just like bringing another agreement: the usage of [' foo ', 'bar'] instead of the array(' foo ', ' bar') to oblige to use Symfony on servers where php is already very up to date for better performance to desmontrate the powerful of Symfony websites where PHP east the PHP5.5 and the not-too-much-verbose of source code....

William Pinaud said on Oct 16, 2014 at 09:43

#39

Can't wait to discover it. Once you start understanding the framework, you realize how many solutions it offers for the same problem to resolve, how many different techniques you can use and how many different "things" you can set in motion for the same purpose.

Answering the same solutions the same way can improve understanding and performance in applications made by other people. Having common basics, all of them being oriented towards the same direction, could really help getting into new projects while still being walking on a ground where you can see landmarks and not feel lost.

Thanks to the team.

Ghost said on Oct 20, 2014 at 12:26

#40

I have an 80000 lines of code Symfony 2.5 project, that was separated in 6 bundles(non-reusable). Each bundle depended on at least one other bundle. I decided to refactor the project according to the Best Practices. It took me about 6-8 hours. The results are wonderful - better structure, shorter names(services, templates, namespaces etc.), a small performance improvement. I highly recommend every Symfony developer read the book. It's worth it!

Frank Neff said on Oct 20, 2014 at 13:14

#41

Probably the most awaited part of documentation ever. Thanks to all contributors.

Nicolas Sauveur said on Oct 21, 2014 at 12:44

#42

This was the missing piece of the documentation ! I am so happy that pragmatism is taking back center stage.

Nicolas Sauveur said on Oct 21, 2014 at 13:11

#43

... so thank you Fabien for reminding all of us about the original pragmatic philosophy of Symfony ! That's what has brought me to Symfony 8 years ago.

Kris said on Oct 25, 2014 at 17:21

#44

This book is awesome, and clarified some things for me. However one issue that I found in the book is that it says

"BEST PRACTICE Don't use the form() or form_start() functions to render the starting and ending form tags."

However in the example right above it you use {{ form_enctype(form) }} which according to the documentation is deprecated and is to be removed in 3.0 and recommended to use form_start instead.

Well which is it? I really think form_start is the better choice, because one other issue by doing it manually, is you have to add the name of the form manually. I really think form_start is a much better option. It says that it doesn't provide clarity... not sure about that seems pretty clear to me?

Can you provide some insight please? Thanks

Lynn van der Berg said on Oct 26, 2014 at 09:20

#45

Kris, that seems a small issue indeed, can you create an issue on github? https://github.com/symfony/symfony/issues

Oskar Stark said on Oct 30, 2014 at 08:04

#46

Is it possible to generate it as epub?

BEST regards Oskar

Parvanova said on Dec 3, 2014 at 16:15

#47

In chapter 1 of the Book: "In addition to this guide, you'll find a sample application developed with all these best practices in mind. ... Please refer to the last chapter of this guide to find more details about this application and the instructions to install it."

Where can I find this sample application. I can't see nothing about it in the last chapter "Tests".

Thanks

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