How to Use the Apache Router
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Read the updated version of this page for Symfony 7.1 (the current stable version).
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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# app/config/config_prod.yml
parameters:
router.options.matcher.cache_class: ~ # disable router cache
router.options.matcher_class: Symfony\Component\Routing\Matcher\ApacheUrlMatcher
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<!-- app/config/config_prod.xml -->
<parameters>
<parameter key="router.options.matcher.cache_class">null</parameter> <!-- disable router cache -->
<parameter key="router.options.matcher_class">Symfony\Component\Routing\Matcher\ApacheUrlMatcher</parameter>
</parameters>
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// app/config/config_prod.php
$container->setParameter('router.options.matcher.cache_class', null); // disable router cache
$container->setParameter(
'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 }
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<!-- app/config/routing.xml -->
<route id="hello" path="/hello/{name}">
<default key="_controller">AppBundle:Greet:hello</default>
</route>
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// app/config/routing.php
$collection->add('hello', new Route('/hello/{name}', array(
'_controller' => 'AppBundle:Greet:hello',
)));
Now generate the mod_rewrite rules:
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$ 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();