New in Symfony 4.1: Hidden services

May 16, 2018 • Published by Javier Eguiluz

Warning: This post is about an unsupported Symfony version. Some of this information may be out of date. Read the most recent Symfony Docs.

Contributed by
Nicolas Grekas
in #26921.

In Symfony 3.4 we made all Symfony services private by default. This is generally better and makes applications more robust (as explained in the previous post) but it also has some drawbacks.

The debug:container command for example hides the private services by default, so it's no longer useful to list the services available in your application. That's why in Symfony 4.1 we've changed the debug:container command to show the private services by default and we've also deprecated the --show-private option.

Independently from being public or private, sometimes it's useful to hide some services from the debug:container listing because they are not intended for being used by the developers. In those cases, you can add a dot character (.) at the beginning of the service ID to turn it into a "hidden service".

Hidden services behave like the rest of services, except for the fact that they are not included by default in the output of debug:container, so you must add the new --show-hidden option to show them:

        1
        $ ./bin/console debug:container --show-hidden
    

We are already using this feature to hide some internal Symfony services created by the Lock component.

Published in #Living on the edge

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Comments

Alex Rock Certified said on May 16, 2018 at 09:09

What are the rules that determine whether a service is hidden or not? Is it only when the name starts with a dot? And if yes, why are these services hidden? :)

Javier Eguiluz Certified said on May 16, 2018 at 09:18

@Alex that's right. If the service ID starts with '.' then it's hidden. Otherwise it's not. Why are they hidden? Each developer will decide to do that in their own app for their own reasons. In the case of Symfony, we hide some services that are not intended to be used by end users.

Grégoire Pineau Certified said on May 16, 2018 at 09:18

@Alexandre:

> Is it only when the name starts with a dot?

Yes, it's explained in this blog post

> And if yes, why are these services hidden? :)

I will quote this blog post:

>> because they are not intended for being used by the developers

Jaik Dean said on May 16, 2018 at 10:45

Was there a particular reason to go with a "." prefix rather than a "hidden: true" option?

Javier Eguiluz Certified said on May 16, 2018 at 11:06

@Jaik I agree. We've created an issue to discuss about this: https://github.com/symfony/symfony/issues/27284

Oskar Stark said on May 16, 2018 at 11:27

Thank you Javier, I am totally with you Jaik, it is very implicit

Dmitry Kolesnikov said on May 16, 2018 at 13:18

Services concept looks kinda more and more complicated. Talking outside 'debug:container' command, will those 'hidden' service have some special meaning?

Nicolas Grekas said on May 16, 2018 at 16:00

This feature has two use cases it has been created for: cleaning up the output of the debug:container command, and cleaning up the service ids that might be suggested in autowiring errors. This means we won't have to care about using this daily. You can mostly forget about it. Internally, we did hide only the identifiers that are generated using hashes, which look like garbage already.
To me, the most important news in this blog post is not that you can hide your identifiers. It's mostly that we did remove some noise from the two output. \o/

Josef Kufner said on May 16, 2018 at 20:55

I guess it would be helpful if debug:container command shows a note that there are N hidden services in addition to the presented list. Such a note may spare us some confusion when locating a bug or when a new developer is getting up to speed with a project.

Patryk Kala said on May 17, 2018 at 09:09

#10

@Josef but hidden services shouldn't be used by developers.

Webnet team said on May 18, 2018 at 08:46

#11

Upvote for deprecating "--show-private" because it was annoying to usually add this option.
After wtf effect has passed the idea of hidden services defined by dot seems a good improvement. Thanks

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