How to Use the Apache Router

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How to Use the Apache Router

Caution

Using the Apache Router is no longer considered a good practice. The small increase obtained in the application routing performance is not worth the hassle of continuously updating the routes configuration.

The Apache Router will be removed in Symfony 3 and it's highly recommended to not use it in your applications.

Symfony, while fast out of the box, also provides various ways to increase that speed with a little bit of tweaking. One of these ways is by letting Apache handle routes directly, rather than using Symfony for this task.

Caution

Apache router was deprecated in Symfony 2.5 and will be removed in Symfony 3.0. Since the PHP implementation of the Router was improved, performance gains were no longer significant (while it's very hard to replicate the same behavior).

Change Router Configuration Parameters

To dump Apache routes you must first tweak some configuration parameters to tell Symfony to use the ApacheUrlMatcher instead of the default one:

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  • PHP 
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# app/config/config_prod.yml
parameters:
    router.options.matcher.cache_class: ~ # disable router cache
    router.options.matcher_class: Symfony\Component\Routing\Matcher\ApacheUrlMatcher

Tip

Note that ApacheUrlMatcher extends UrlMatcher so even if you don't regenerate the mod_rewrite rules, everything will work (because at the end of ApacheUrlMatcher::match() a call to parent::match() is done).

Generating mod_rewrite Rules

To test that it's working, create a very basic route for the AppBundle:

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# app/config/routing.yml
hello:
    path: /hello/{name}
    defaults: { _controller: AppBundle:Greet:hello }

Now generate the mod_rewrite rules:

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$ php app/console router:dump-apache -e=prod --no-debug

Which should roughly output the following:

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# skip "real" requests
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
RewriteRule .* - [QSA,L]

# hello
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/hello/([^/]+?)$
RewriteRule .* app.php [QSA,L,E=_ROUTING__route:hello,E=_ROUTING_name:%1,E=_ROUTING__controller:AppBundle\:Greet\:hello]

You can now rewrite web/.htaccess to use the new rules, so with this example it should look like this:

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<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On

    # skip "real" requests
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
    RewriteRule .* - [QSA,L]

    # hello
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/hello/([^/]+?)$
    RewriteRule .* app.php [QSA,L,E=_ROUTING__route:hello,E=_ROUTING_name:%1,E=_ROUTING__controller:AppBundle\:Greet\:hello]
</IfModule>

Note

The procedure above should be done each time you add/change a route if you want to take full advantage of this setup.

That's it! You're now all set to use Apache routes.

Additional Tweaks

To save some processing time, change occurrences of Request to ApacheRequest in web/app.php:

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// web/app.php

require_once __DIR__.'/../app/bootstrap.php.cache';
require_once __DIR__.'/../app/AppKernel.php';
// require_once __DIR__.'/../app/AppCache.php';

use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\ApacheRequest;

$kernel = new AppKernel('prod', false);
$kernel->loadClassCache();
// $kernel = new AppCache($kernel);
$kernel->handle(ApacheRequest::createFromGlobals())->send();
This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.
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