New in Symfony 3.2: PHP constants in YAML files

June 30, 2016 Javier Eguiluz

YAML is arguably the most popular format to define the configuration of the Symfony applications. Unfortunately, due to the YAML format nature, it doesn't provide feature parity with other formats such as XML. In particular, it's not possible to use PHP constants in YAML files, for example as service arguments.

In Symfony 3.2, we decided to augment the YAML format with a custom extension to support PHP constants. If some content in a YAML file is prefixed with the !php/const: string, it's now considered a PHP constant:

parameters:
    # this is considered a regular string
    foo: PHP_INT_MAX
    # this is considered a PHP constant
    bar: !php/const:PHP_INT_MAX
    # starting from Symfony 3.4, use this syntax instead:
    bar: !php/const PHP_INT_MAX

By default, the Symfony Yaml component only parses/generates standard- compliant YAML contents. Therefore, when using the stand-alone Yaml component, you must enable this feature explicitly with the Yaml::PARSE_CONSTANT flag:

use Symfony\Component\Yaml\Yaml;

$yaml = <<<YAML
foo:
    !php/const:PHP_INT_MAX
YAML;

// starting from Symfony 3.4, use this syntax instead:
$yaml = <<<YAML
foo:
    !php/const PHP_INT_MAX
YAML;

$config = Yaml::parse($yaml, Yaml::PARSE_CONSTANT);
// $config = array('foo' => PHP_INT_MAX);

If you use the Symfony framework, this option is enabled by default in the YamlFileLoader used by the DependencyInjection component. This means that you can use PHP constants in your YAML services out-of-the-box:

# app/config/services.yml
services:
    app.my_service:
        # ...
        arguments:
            - '@app.other_service'
            - !php/const:AppBundle\Entity\BlogPost::MUM_ITEMS
            - !php/const:Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Kernel::VERSION
            # starting from Symfony 3.4, use this syntax instead:
            - !php/const AppBundle\Entity\BlogPost::MUM_ITEMS
            - !php/const Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Kernel::VERSION

Comments

Khaled ADALA said on Jun 30, 2016 at 07:57 #1

Cool addition!

Christophe Coevoet said on Jun 30, 2016 at 08:17 #2

Your code example for the service is wrong. ``!php/const:AppBundle\Entity\BlogPost::MUM_ITEMS`` must not be quoted

Javier Eguiluz said on Jun 30, 2016 at 08:20 #3

@stof you are right! It's fixed now. Thanks.

Fahari Hamada Sidi said on Jun 30, 2016 at 08:33 #4

Great !!

Tomáš Votruba said on Jun 30, 2016 at 09:10 #5

Nice tuning!

Also I would point out another use case: Product::class, e.g. for entity repositoty.

Jules Pietri said on Jun 30, 2016 at 11:24 #6

@Tomáš You would also need the class' namespace to resolve it, which would make "::class" useless.

Yasmany Cubela Medina said on Jun 30, 2016 at 15:03 #7

Great. Maybe this is not the right place to ask since i dont know if this is already possible, to read ENV variables from a YAML file, example:

services:
app.my_service:
# ...
arguments:
- '@app.other_service'
- ENV_VAR

Where ENV_VAR is an env variable defined on user session scope.

Javier Eguiluz said on Jun 30, 2016 at 17:50 #8

@Yasmani you might be interested in this PR: https://github.com/symfony/symfony/pull/18155

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