Forms power nearly every user interaction in a web application - from registration, login and search boxes to full data management interfaces. Getting them right is essential, and Symfony’s Form component is designed to make your forms both powerful and maintainable.

We’re excited to announce a new SymfonyCasts course:

👉 Symfony Forms - The Basics

In this course, we build a real form inside a Symfony project and explore the Form component from top to bottom. Together, we'll see how Symfony transforms raw request data into clean, validated objects - without the pain of manually reading request data, validating fields by hand, or wiring everything together yourself.

By the end, you’ll understand how Symfony Forms work under the hood and how to build fast, flexible, elegant, form-driven features with confidence.

What This Course Covers

Note: While this course uses Symfony 7, it works just as well with Symfony 8!

This course starts with the fundamentals and builds step-by-step into more advanced, real-world scenarios.

Key topics we cover include:

  • Installing and configuring the Symfony Form component
  • Generating form types with Maker and mapping them to Doctrine entities
  • Understanding the difference between Form and FormView
  • Rendering forms and fields using Twig helper functions
  • Using form_start(), form_widget(), and form_end() to control form structure
  • Styling forms with Symfony’s built-in Tailwind form theme
  • Adding submit buttons in Twig or as SubmitType fields
  • Handling submissions with $form->handleRequest()
  • Persisting validated data with Doctrine
  • Adding flash messages after successful submission
  • Working with multiple submit buttons and detecting which one was clicked
  • Using built-in field types and Symfony’s type guessing
  • Exploring available field types with the debug:form console command
  • Configuring powerful EntityType fields with custom queries and labels
  • Adding HTML attributes like classes, IDs, and data attributes
  • Applying validation with Symfony Validator constraints at both form and entity levels
  • Protecting forms with CSRF tokens and understanding how that protection works
  • Using Tailwind v4’s new @source feature to compile classes from form themes

Want a quick visual explanation of CSRF protection first? Check out this short video on the difference between stateful and stateless CSRF:

👉 Stateful vs Stateless CSRF protection in Symfony

The focus isn’t just on making forms work, but on understanding why they work - and how all the pieces fit together.

Who Is This For?

This course is perfect if you:

  • Are new to Symfony and want a solid foundation in forms
  • Have used Symfony Forms before but want a clearer mental model
  • Build CRUD-style interfaces or user-facing features
  • Want to stop treating forms like “magic” and start using them with confidence

If forms have ever felt mysterious or overly complex, this course will help make them predictable and powerful.

What’s Next on SymfonyCasts?

There's more content coming to keep leveling up your Symfony knowledge and confidence!

We’re actively working on two upcoming courses that explore other core parts of Symfony:

  • Symfony Security: The Basics - a practical introduction to Symfony’s security system, covering authentication, login forms, user providers, and the core concepts behind securing your application.
  • Doctrine Inheritance - a focused deep dive into modeling inheritance with Doctrine ORM, including mapped superclasses, single table inheritance, joined tables, querying strategies, and the trade-offs of each approach.

Stay tuned — more deep dives into the tools you use every day are coming soon!

Published in #Tutorials