Symfony 2019 Year in Review

Releases

We released three new major versions: Symfony 4.3 in May and Symfony 4.4 (the new LTS version) and Symfony 5.0 in November. We also published 49 maintenance versions in six different branches (2.7, 2.8, 3.4, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3).

In addition, we published 261 blog posts, including 82 New in Symfony articles explaining the new features introduced by Symfony 4.3, 4.4 and 5.0.

Events and Conferences

We organized eight official Symfony conferences:

• SymfonyLive Lille 2019 (March 1)
• SymfonyLive Paris 2019 (March 28-29)
• SymfonyLive Tunis 2019 (April 27)
• SymfonyLive São Paulo 2019 (May 16-17)
• SymfonyLive Warszawa 2019 (June 13-14)
• SymfonyLive London 2019 (September 13)
• SymfonyLive Berlin 2019 (September 24-27)
• SymfonyCon Amsterdam 2019 (November 21-23)

The conferences at Lille, Tunis, São Paulo and Warszawa celebrated their first edition and most of them are returning in 2020. Meanwhile, the SymfonyCon in Amsterdam gathered 1,600 Symfony developers, the biggest Symfony conference ever.

Next year, the SymfonyCon 2020 conference will be celebrated at Disneyland Paris (December 3-5, 2020) and it will be the only official Symfony conference in English.

Meanwhile, the community celebrated lots of unofficial Symfony events and meetups around the world, including the sfday 2019 in Verona (Italy), Symfony Camp UA 2019 in Kiev (Ukraine) and the first Symfony India meetup.

Symfony Core Team

The Symfony Core Team is the group of developers that determine the direction and evolution of the Symfony project.

In June, Symfony appointed Yonel Ceruto as the newest member of the team, totaling 19 active members and 4 former members. As it happened with most Core Team members, Yonel's first contribution to Symfony was to fix a typo in some code, so you may consider making your first Symfony contribution as one of your goals for 2020.

Symfony Components

Symfony components surpassed 500 million downloads in 2016 and 1 billion in 2017. In 2019 they surpassed 3 billion downloads and our pseudo-real time download stats show around 56 downloads per second ( 5 million downloads per day).

In 2019 we released nine new components:

• Mime
• Mailer
• HttpClient
• ErrorHandler
• Notifier
• String
• UUID Polyfill
• PHP 7.4 Polyfill
• and the Symfony Contracts

Symfony 5

One of the biggest news for Symfony in 2019 was the Symfony 5 release. Symfony 4 reimagined Symfony development experience entirely. Symfony 5 built on top of that to provide an even better developer experience and many new and powerful features.

Symfony Cloud

After two years of development and years of R&D with our partners, the technology behind SymfonyCloud was announced as production-ready in July 2019.

SymfonyCloud is a fully-managed platform created for busy Symfony developers. It is the best way to host your Symfony applications and a nice way of funding the Symfony project development.

Related to this, the Symfony CLI published around 40 releases and the Symfony Local Server provided by it added lots of new features.

Hackathon

In April, 50 of the more active Symfony developers gathered in Brussels (Belgium) to attend a Hackathon organized by the European Union through its EU-FOSSA 2 program.

The hackathon resulted in a frantic Symfony development activity, allowing to boost or finish many important Symfony features, such as the new encrypted secrets management.

Security

We published 11 security advisories. Thanks to Fabien and Michael from the Security Team for their coordination work and thanks to all developers who reported vulnerabilities and thanks to those who fixed them.

Check out your notification preferences if you want to receive an email whenever a new security release is published.

Diversity

The Symfony Diversity and Inclusion initiative was also part of the Hackathon. We also added a new diversity governance process, we organized a fundraising for the Symfony conferences scholarship program and we announced a "conference buddy" program and a speaker mentoring workshop during SymfonyCon.

Symfony 5 Book

In October, a new book about Symfony was announced: Symfony 5: The Fast Track. It was originally launched as a crowdfunding project, and the project backers received it as a printed book, but it will also be published for free in the coming weeks.

Check out this blog post for an overview of the book contents and the complex applications built with it.

Contributors

According to GitHub contribution stats these were the most active contributors in 2019 in the main Symfony repositories:

Other Relevant News

• We launched a limited-time Security Bug Bounty Program for Symfony.
• SymfonyInsight introduced its portfolio, a single dashboard showing the most important metrics about what is currently happening in your Symfony projects, in real-time.
• Kévin introduced the Mercure component and bundle to provide real-time push capabilities to Symfony projects.
• Thanks to a coordinated community effort, FontAwesome added Symfony icon to its popular icon set.
• We published Symfony Contracts, which is a set of abstractions extracted out of the Symfony Components.
• Twig 3 was released and we published some posts to prepare your Symfony applications for Twig 3.
• We changed the maintenance period of standard releases.
• We added support for PHP 7.4 preloading in Symfony applications.
• We added PHP type declarations to the entire Symfony codebase.

Thank You

As it happens every year, this was the best year in Symfony's history. All this wouldn't be possible without your continuous support. Thanks for being part of the Symfony community.