Usage

Whenever you reference a class that has not been required or included yet, PHP uses the autoloading mechanism to delegate the loading of a file defining the class. Symfony provides three autoloaders, which are able to load your classes:

• The PSR-0 Class Loader: loads classes that follow the PSR-0 class naming standard;
• The PSR-4 Class Loader: loads classes that follow the `PSR-4` class naming standard;
• MapClassLoader: loads classes using a static map from class name to file path.

Additionally, the Symfony ClassLoader component ships with a wrapper class which makes it possible to cache the results of a class loader.

When using the Debug component, you can also use a special DebugClassLoader that eases debugging by throwing more helpful exceptions when a class could not be found by a class loader.

Installation

You can install the component in 2 different ways:

• Install it via Composer (symfony/class-loader on Packagist);
• Use the official Git repository (https://github.com/symfony/ClassLoader).

Then, require the vendor/autoload.php file to enable the autoloading mechanism provided by Composer. Otherwise, your application won't be able to find the classes of this Symfony component.