One of Symfony's greatest strengths is its upgrade process. Thanks to the backward compatibility promise and deprecation system, major upgrades are smooth, predictable, and, dare I say it, enjoyable!
Our newest tutorial is now available - and completely free:
In this course, we take a real Symfony application and guide it through the entire upgrade process. You'll learn how to identify and fix deprecations, modernize dependencies, prepare for PHP 8.4, and upgrade to Symfony 8 with confidence.
By the end, you'll have a practical, repeatable process that you can apply to your own applications - making future upgrades smaller, safer, and much less stressful.
What This Course Covers
This course follows a real-world Symfony application through the upgrade process, some of the things you'll learn include:
- Understanding Symfony's backward compatibility promise
- Finding and fixing deprecations
- Using automated tests to upgrade safely
- Updating Composer dependencies
- Preparing your application for Symfony 8 and PHP 8.4
- Modernizing Doctrine integrations
- Cleaning up deprecated configuration and APIs
- Verifying third-party bundle compatibility
As a bonus chapter, we also cover something that's become increasingly important for every PHP developer: dependency security.
Recent advances in AI-assisted security auditing have dramatically increased the number of vulnerabilities being discovered across the entire software ecosystem. That's good news - issues are being found and fixed faster than ever - but it also means it's more important than ever to stay on top of dependency updates.
In the bonus chapter, you'll learn how to use Composer's built-in
composer audit command to identify known vulnerabilities, understand
security advisories, and keep your applications secure as part of your
regular maintenance workflow.
Who Is This For?
This course is perfect if you:
- Maintain Symfony applications that need to stay current
- Want a repeatable process for framework upgrades
- Feel intimidated by major version upgrades
- Want to better understand Symfony's upgrade philosophy
- Care about keeping your dependencies secure
Whether you're upgrading your first application or your fiftieth, this course will help make the process predictable and approachable.
What's Next on SymfonyCasts?
If this course leaves you wanting more, we're already releasing the next chapter in your Symfony journey.
- Symfony Security: The Basics - learn the fundamentals of Symfony's security system, including authentication, login forms, user providers, password hashing, CSRF protection, and more.
And coming soon:
- E2E Testing - a practical guide to browser testing, including authentication, JavaScript interactions, debugging tools, and complete user flows from end to end.
In the meantime, check out a couple of our recent blog posts:
Keeping Doctrine Entities Honest - Should your Doctrine entities always represent valid domain objects? We explore a different approach that separates persistence from user input using Symfony's ObjectMapper.
Meet Brontie, Your AI Companion - Meet our new AI-powered course assistant that can answer questions about the current chapter, explain concepts, and help you learn faster without leaving the course.
Happy upgrading!