Symfony 2023 Year in Review

Releases

We released three new major versions: Symfony 6.3 in May and Symfony 6.4 (LTS) and Symfony 7.0 in November. We also published 58 maintenance versions in eight different branches (4.4, 5.4, 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, and 7.0).

We bumped the PHP requirement to 8.2 for the new Symfony 7.0 version.

In addition, we published 311 blog posts (22 more than last year), including 49 New in Symfony articles explaining the new features introduced by Symfony 6.3 and 6.4/7.0.

We also published 52 A Week of Symfony blog posts and we total almost 900 weekly posts since we started, which makes it one of the longest-running series in the entire tech industry.

Events and Conferences

We organized four conferences:

• SymfonyLive Paris 2023 on March 23-24, 2023
• SymfonyOnline June 2023 on June 15-16, 2023
• SymfonyLive Berlin 2023 on October 5-6, 2023
• SymfoynCon Brussels 2023 on December 7-8 2023

The SymfonyCon conference in Brussels was a blast and gathered more than 1,200 people.

In 2024 we plan to organize at least these conferences:

• SymfonyOnline January 2024 on January 18-19; an online conference in English;
• SymfonyLive Paris 2024 on March 28-29; a physical conference for French-speaking developers;
• SymfonyCon Vienna 2024 on December 5-6; a world-wide physical 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 2023, Symfony didn't appoint any new member to the group. We hope to add new members in 2024, who will be selected among the most active contributors of Symfony code and docs.

Symfony Components

Symfony components surpassed 20 billion downloads in 2023 (500 million in 2016, 1 billion in 2017, 3 billion in 2019, 6 billion in 2020, 10 billion in 2021, 15 billion in 2022). Check out our pseudo real-time download stats.

In 2023 we released lots of new components:

• Scheduler
• Webhook and RemoteEvent
• AssetMapper
• symfony/ux-svelte, symfony/ux-translator, and symfony/ux-toggle-password, as part of the Symfony UX project.
• 13 new notifier packages and 4 new mailer packages to integrate Symfony applications with third-party services that send emails, SMS messages, etc.

Security

We published six 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 2023 in the two main Symfony repositories:

Symfony Sponsorship Program

In 2021 we announced a Symfony Sponsorship Program and a SaaS Sponsoring Program that allows companies to sponsor different parts of the Symfony project.

In 2023, new companies joined the program or renewed their sponsorships:

• SensioLabs sponsors the Symfony 6.4 release, the Messenger component for 6.4 and 7.0, and the Symfony 6.4 book;
• Les-Tilleuls.coop sponsors the Console component for Symfony 6.4 and 7.0 and the Symfony 7.0 release;
• Private Packagist sponsors the Symfony 6.4 release;
• SymfonyCasts sponsors the Security component for Symfony 6.4;
• redirection.io sponsors the Routing component for Symfony 6.4, 7.0 and 7.1;
• Innovative Web AG sponsors the HttpClient component for Symfony 6.4 and 7.0;
• Blackfire.io sponsors the book for Symfony 6.4;
• QOSSMIC sponsors the book for Symfony 6.4;
• Platform.sh sponsors the book for Symfony 6.4;
• Sulu sponsors the Symfony 7.0 release;
• Shopware sponsors the Symfony 7.0 release;
• Mercure.rocks sponsors the UX project.

Check out all the Symfony backers. Talk to your company about this program and, if you are interested, contact us.

Other Relevant News

• We introduced the Symfony 7 certification
• We published the last release of Twig 2
• We attended the API Platform Conference
• We completed a multi-year effort to add all PHP type declarations to Symfony code
• We updated the documentation on deploying Symfony on Platform.sh
• We migrated symfony.com search engine to Meilisearch

Thank You

Overall, this was a great year for Symfony. All this was possible thanks to your continuous support.

Thanks for being part of the Symfony community!