Paving the way for Symfony 3 with the "Deprecation Detector" tool

October 21, 2015 • Published by Javier Eguiluz

Symfony 3 will be released at the end of November 2015. Learning from our own history, the transition from Symfony 2 to 3 will be much more pleasant than the transition from symfony 1 to 2 that happened in July 2011.

Technically speaking, Symfony 3 includes no new features comparing it with Symfony 2.8, which will be released at the same time. The main change introduced by Symfony 3 is that any feature, option or behavior marked as deprecated in 2.8 version will be removed.

This means that your Symfony applications won't work on Symfony 3 unless you remove all their deprecations. In order to simplify the task of finding which deprecations affect your applications, a new tool called Deprecation Detector has just been released.

This command console application runs a static code analysis against your project's source code to find usages of deprecated methods, classes, interfaces and services. Specifically, it identifies the use of deprecated code thanks to the @deprecated annotation.

Although this tool is still in a very early stage of development, you can already test it in your own applications:

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        $ git clone git@github.com:sensiolabs-de/deprecation-detector.git
$ cd deprecation-detector
$ composer install
$ ./bin/deprecation-detector check /path/to/your-project/src /path/to/your-project/vendor
    

Tip

Since you are probably going to use this tool very frequently, it's better to build a PHAR file and install it globally, as explained in its documentation.

Deprecation Detector is a project developed by the team at SensioLabs Deutschland, maintained by Marvin Klemp and published as Open Source. Your issues and pull requests are more than welcome to improve the project.

Published in #Living on the edge

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Comments

Raphaël Salique said on Oct 21, 2015 at 07:26

Hello,

There may be a typo ? "composer install" should come after "cd deprecation-detector" ?

Artem Ostretsov said on Oct 21, 2015 at 07:27

Thank you for the care!

Javier Eguiluz Certified said on Oct 21, 2015 at 07:42

@Raphaël nice catch! Fixed. Thanks.

Loïc Vernet Certified said on Oct 21, 2015 at 07:53

Good news. But I think the major problem will be with vendor bundles...

Karel Sommer said on Oct 21, 2015 at 09:47

does it work?

11:42 $ ./bin/deprecation-detector check -vvv examples/
Checking your application for deprecations - this could take a while ...
Loading rule sets: 27/27
Checking files for deprecations: 8/8
There are no violations - congratulations!
Checked source files in 1.981 seconds, 7 MB memory used
✔ ~/deprecation-detector [master|✔]

Javier Eguiluz Certified said on Oct 21, 2015 at 10:23

@Karel if you pass the path of the project, you must pass both the src/ and vendor/ directories paths. It may be easier to use it like this:

$ cd project_directory/
$ /path/to/deprecation-detector check

Medi Dana said on Oct 21, 2015 at 11:31

There are many bundles out there which have not updated, I hope someone upgrade them soon so can work with Symfony 3.*

Tigran Azatyan said on Oct 22, 2015 at 19:00

Thanks

Art Hundiak said on Oct 23, 2015 at 13:54

With respect to upgrading bundles. almost of of them are open source so roll up your sleeves and get cracking. It will be interesting to see how the 3rd party upgrades play out. What is probably the most widely used bundle, FOSUserBundle, still targets Symfony 2.1. There is an alpha version for S2.3 but it's been a work in progress for years. Will it ever be moved to S3.0? That is the question.

Evil Thug said on Oct 26, 2015 at 07:31

#10

Is the directory structure going to change for Symfony 3 or are we still going to use the old (=

Alexander G. said on Oct 30, 2015 at 12:05

#11

cool