Symfony 2021 Year in Review

Releases

We released three new major versions: Symfony 5.3 in May and Symfony 5.4 (LTS) and Symfony 6.0 in November. We also published 63 maintenance versions in seven different branches (3.4, 4.4, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 and 6.0).

In addition, we published 248 blog posts, including 43 New in Symfony articles explaining the new features introduced by Symfony 5.3, 5.4 and 6.0.

Events and Conferences

We organized six online conferences in five different languages:

• SymfonyLive Online 2021 in Polish on March 12 2021
• SymfonyLive Online 2021 in French on April 9 2021
• SymfonyLive Online 2021 in German on April 16 2021
• SymfonyLive Online 2021 in Spanish on May 7 2021
• SymfonyWorld Online 2021 Summer Edition in English on June 17-18 2021
• SymfonyWorld Online 2021 Winter Edition in English on December 9-10 2021

Read the Symfony Conferences 2021 recap for more details.

In 2022 we plan to organize at least these conferences:

• SymfonyLive Paris 2022 on April 7-8; a physical conference for French-speaking developers;
• SymfonyWorld Online 2022 Summer Edition on June 16-17; an online conference in English.

You can already send your Call For Paper proposals and buy your tickets for these conferences. Stay tuned for more announcements about other upcoming conferences.

Symfony Core Team

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

In 2021, Symfony appointed five new members to the group:

• Oskar Stark,
• Thomas Calvet,
• Mathieu Santostefano,
• Kevin Bond,
• Jérôme Tamarelle.

Symfony Components

Symfony components surpassed 10 billion downloads in 2021 (500 million in 2016, 1 billion in 2017, 3 billions in 2019 and 6 billions in 2020) and our pseudo-real time download stats show around 12 million downloads per day.

In 2021 we released two new components:

• PasswordHasher
• Runtime

Security

We published five security advisories. Thanks to the Symfony Security Team for their coordination work and thanks to all developers who reported and fixed those vulnerabilities.

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

Contributors

According to GitHub contribution stats these were the most active contributors in 2021 in the main Symfony repositories:

Symfony Code

1. Nicolas Grekas: 556 commits
2. Alexander M. Turek: 307 commits
3. Fabien Potencier: 284 commits
4. Christian Flothmann: 132 commits
5. Robin Chalas: 112 commits

Symfony Docs

1. Javier Eguiluz: 342 commits
2. gnito-org: 63 commits
3. Sebastian Paczkowski: 59 commits
4. Thomas Landauer: 52 commits
5. Tobias Nyholm: 41 commits

These are the stats for the two main Symfony repositories, but there are many other contributors working on other repositories and there are many developers working on third-party bundles too. Thanks to all of them!

Symfony Sponsorship Program

In September 2021 we announced a new Symfony Sponsorship Program that allows companies to sponsor different parts of the Symfony project, such as a full Symfony release or a Symfony component.

A few weeks later we announced another Symfony Sponsoring Program for SaaS Providers that allows SaaS companies like Amazon, Slack and Twilio to sponsor the packages that integrate their services into Symfony.

Many companies have already joined the program. Talk to your company about this and, if you are interested, contact us to learn more about the program.

Other Relevant News

• We appointed five new members to the CARE Team which is in charge of enforcing the Symfony Code of Conduct on all official channels (conferences, websites, GitHub, Slack chat, etc.);
• We updated the Symfony Book to Symfony 5.2 version and we published new translations for it (13 in total);
• We tested the use of GitHub Discussions for Symfony Support;
• We improved Symfony Flex to open source it and to turn it into a serverless application based on GitHub;
• We redesigned Symfony Docs website;
• We released Symfony UX 2.0 & Stimulus 3 Support;
• We launched Symfony Demo 2.0 with Symfony 6.0 support;
• We introduced a new feature to automatically create, manage and run the Docker containers in Symfony applications.

Thank You

Despite the continuous challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, this was a good year for Symfony. All this wouldn't be possible without your continuous support. Thanks for being part of the Symfony community and stay safe!