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The PSR-0 Class Loader

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The PSR-0 Class Loader

If your classes and third-party libraries follow the PSR-0 standard, you can use the Symfony\Component\ClassLoader\ClassLoader class to load all of your project’s classes.

Tip

You can use both the ApcClassLoader and the XcacheClassLoader to cache a ClassLoader instance or the DebugClassLoader to debug it.

Usage

Registering the Symfony\Component\ClassLoader\ClassLoader autoloader is straightforward:

require_once '/path/to/src/Symfony/Component/ClassLoader/ClassLoader.php';

use Symfony\Component\ClassLoader\ClassLoader;

$loader = new ClassLoader();

// to enable searching the include path (eg. for PEAR packages)
$loader->setUseIncludePath(true);

// ... register namespaces and prefixes here - see below

$loader->register();

Note

The autoloader is automatically registered in a Symfony application (see app/autoload.php).

Use the addPrefix() or addPrefixes() methods to register your classes:

// register a single namespaces
$loader->addPrefix('Symfony', __DIR__.'/vendor/symfony/symfony/src');

// register several namespaces at once
$loader->addPrefixes(array(
    'Symfony' => __DIR__.'/../vendor/symfony/symfony/src',
    'Monolog' => __DIR__.'/../vendor/monolog/monolog/src',
));

// register a prefix for a class following the PEAR naming conventions
$loader->addPrefix('Twig_', __DIR__.'/vendor/twig/twig/lib');

$loader->addPrefixes(array(
    'Swift_' => __DIR__.'/vendor/swiftmailer/swiftmailer/lib/classes',
    'Twig_'  => __DIR__.'/vendor/twig/twig/lib',
));

Classes from a sub-namespace or a sub-hierarchy of PEAR classes can be looked for in a location list to ease the vendoring of a sub-set of classes for large projects:

$loader->addPrefixes(array(
    'Doctrine\\Common'           => __DIR__.'/vendor/doctrine/common/lib',
    'Doctrine\\DBAL\\Migrations' => __DIR__.'/vendor/doctrine/migrations/lib',
    'Doctrine\\DBAL'             => __DIR__.'/vendor/doctrine/dbal/lib',
    'Doctrine'                   => __DIR__.'/vendor/doctrine/orm/lib',
));

In this example, if you try to use a class in the Doctrine\Common namespace or one of its children, the autoloader will first look for the class under the doctrine-common directory. If not found, it will then fallback to the default Doctrine directory (the last one configured) before giving up. The order of the prefix registrations is significant in this case.

This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.