Introducing the Symfony Maker Bundle

November 21, 2017 • Published by Javier Eguiluz

If you've been around the Symfony community for some time, odds are you know and have used the SensioGeneratorBundle. It's a popular bundle (+20 million downloads) that provides console commands to generate boilerplate code, like controllers and entities. It also includes a basic CRUD generator.

Given that SensioGeneratorBundle is starting to show its age and considering the massive simplifications introduced by Symfony 4, we decided to stop evolving that bundle and we've created a new bundle called SymfonyMakerBundle.

SymfonyMakerBundle helps you creating empty commands, controllers, form classes, tests and more so you can forget about the required boilerplate code. It's an alternative to SensioGeneratorBundle for modern Symfony applications and requires using Symfony 3.4 or newer and Symfony Flex.

Of course the end goal is to not have boilerplate code at all in Symfony applications. Symfony 4 made a lot of improvements towards that goal, but you will always have to bootstrap some code, so having a modern, simple and lightweight bundle to do that is nice.

Generating Code with Makers

The usage of the bundle is similar to SensioGeneratorBundle, but the commands now use the make: prefix instead of generate:. In this first version of the bundle we've implemented the following makers:

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        $ php bin/console list make

  make:command
  make:controller
  make:entity
  make:form
  make:functional-test
  make:subscriber
  make:twig-extension
  make:unit-test
  make:validator
  make:voter
    

Later we'll add more commands, including some interactive makers to generate a Doctrine entity asking for its properties, to generate a form based on a Doctrine entity, etc.

How Can You Help Us

The best way to help us is to test it in your own applications and report any issue or uncovered edge case. You can also review the code to improve it using any of the modern PHP 7.1 features.

If you have ideas for new features or maker commands, please open an issue to discuss about them instead of sending a pull request.

Finally, it'd be great if you could give this project a GitHub Star because that motivates us a lot.

Published in #Meet the Bundle #Symfony

Help the Symfony project!

As with any Open-Source project, contributing code or documentation is the most common way to help, but we also have a wide range of sponsoring opportunities.

Comments

Loïc Faugeron said on Nov 21, 2017 at 13:03

MakerBundle sounds really promising, too bad we don't have any examples of the code generated and the use cases. Maybe the article can be edited with added code snippets?

SensioGeneratorBundle used to generate many files (eg a whole empty bundle, controllers with templates and routing configuration, entities with repositories and yaml configuration, etc), while MakerBundle only seems to generate a class files (no routing config generated for controllers).

Is there any plan to also generate the related files (like config)? Because otherwise MakerBundle sounds like what simple text editor snippet generators already do, only with the additional constraint of needing to be installed in your application (speaking of which, is there a plan to change the bundle into a standalone cli tool?).

Javier Eguiluz Certified said on Nov 21, 2017 at 13:51

@Loïc you should really try this bundle to see it in action :) If I understand you well, you imply that this bundle is not complete because when you generate for example a controller class, no config file is modified to define a route for the controller. However, we use annotations for the route so there's no config file to edit.

The same for the other makers: Symfony 4 autowiring is so great, that you don't need to configure anything to make things work. That's why we have a generator for event subscribers but not for even listeners (which would require changing files).

For the moment we don't have plans to make this a CLI tool. It only works for modern Symfony apps which follow the dir structure proposed by Symfony.

Loïc Faugeron said on Nov 21, 2017 at 14:16

@Javier ha, I forgot annotations. Sounds like not much more features need to be added to it then.

Too bad it's not gonna be a CLI tool. Even if it's "Symfony only", having to install it in your application rather than globally feels a bit weird.

Anyways, keep up the good work!

jeremyFreeAgent — Jérémy Romey Certified said on Nov 22, 2017 at 09:24

Great work!

Jérémy Jumeau said on Nov 22, 2017 at 16:08

Nice! Great news!

Jakub Tobiasz said on Nov 22, 2017 at 16:14

Awesome!

Isaac Flores said on Nov 24, 2017 at 13:20

Hello everybody,

I'm using symfony 4.0 RC and when I try to install the maker bundle I get a error message.

>composer require maker
[InvalidArgumentException]
Could not find package symfony/maker-bundle at any version for your minimum-stability (RC). Check the package spelling or your minimum-stabil
ity

Can you tell me if I need to do a special configuration before install the maker bundle?
I read the install doc here : https://github.com/symfony/maker-bundle/blob/master/src/Resources/doc/index.rst

Greetings!!!

Adil YASSINE ✌️ Certified said on Nov 24, 2017 at 13:56

@Isaac, I think MakerBundle will be available next week with the Symfony 4 version

Isaac Flores said on Nov 25, 2017 at 12:01

Thanks @Adil
I will be waiting for this useful feature :)

Congratulations to the Symfony developers Team!!!

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