Symfony 5.4 and Symfony 6.0 will be released simultaneously at the end of November 2021. According to the Symfony release process, both versions will have the same features, but Symfony 6.0 won't include any deprecated features.

This is the first article of the series that shows the most important new features introduced by Symfony 5.4 and 6.0 versions.

Wouter De Jong
Contributed by Wouter De Jong in #42251

Symfony Console is one of the favorite Symfony Components and the most downloaded one if we exclude the Polyfill components (368 million downloads as of October 2021). It's packed with features and it has become the standard way of creating CLI applications in PHP.

In Symfony 5.4 we've improved the Console component with the most important and most requested missing feature: autocompletion. When running a Symfony command you can now press the TAB key to see a list of contextual suggestions.

In the following GIF, you can see how pressing the TAB key first shows the list of commands available. After typing secrets:remove, when you press TAB again it autocompletes the argument value with one of the valid secret names of the application:

Symfony Console Autocompletion in Symfony applications

Autocompletion will not only boost your productivity, but it will also prevent many typos and issues when passing options and arguments to commands. This feature works for Bash shell, but we intend to support other shells such as Zsh and Fish in the near future. Also, this is not limited to Symfony applications. The following GIF shows the autocompletion of options and arguments in a Laravel command:

Symfony Console Autocompletion in Other Applications such as Laravel

Technically, autocompletion is enabled when your command class defines a complete() method. Inside this method you need to generate the appropriate suggestions for each input. For example, if your command defines an argument called format which only allows passing json and xml as its values, add this:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
use Symfony\Component\Console\Command\Command;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Completion\CompletionInput;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Completion\CompletionSuggestions;

class SomeCommand extends Command
{
    // ...

    public function complete(CompletionInput $input, CompletionSuggestions $suggestions): void
    {
        if ($input->mustSuggestOptionValuesFor('format')) {
            $suggestions->suggestValues(['json', 'xml']);
        }
    }
}

Usually, the suggestions will be dynamic, so you'll need to call some other methods and services to generate those values instead of passing an array of values to suggestValues().

During these past weeks, the Symfony community has worked on a colossal joint effort to add autocompletion for all internal Symfony commands. Here's the list of commands updated so far:

Published in #Living on the edge