The Routing Component
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The Routing Component
The Routing component maps an HTTP request to a set of configuration variables. It's used to build routing systems for web applications where each URL is associated with some code to execute.
Installation
1
$ composer require symfony/routing
Note
If you install this component outside of a Symfony application, you must
require the vendor/autoload.php
file in your code to enable the class
autoloading mechanism provided by Composer. Read
this article for more details.
Usage
The main Symfony routing article explains all the features of this component when used inside a Symfony application. This article only explains the things you need to do to use it in a non-Symfony PHP application.
Routing System Setup
A routing system has three parts:
- A RouteCollection, which contains the route definitions (instances of the Route class);
- A RequestContext, which has information about the request;
- A UrlMatcher, which performs the mapping of the path to a single route.
Here is a quick example:
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use App\Controller\BlogController;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Generator\UrlGenerator;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Matcher\UrlMatcher;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\RequestContext;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Route;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\RouteCollection;
$route = new Route('/blog/{slug}', ['_controller' => BlogController::class]);
$routes = new RouteCollection();
$routes->add('blog_show', $route);
$context = new RequestContext('/');
// Routing can match routes with incoming requests
$matcher = new UrlMatcher($routes, $context);
$parameters = $matcher->match('/blog/lorem-ipsum');
// $parameters = [
// '_controller' => 'App\Controller\BlogController',
// 'slug' => 'lorem-ipsum',
// '_route' => 'blog_show'
// ]
// Routing can also generate URLs for a given route
$generator = new UrlGenerator($routes, $context);
$url = $generator->generate('blog_show', [
'slug' => 'my-blog-post',
]);
// $url = '/blog/my-blog-post'
The RouteCollection::add() method takes two arguments. The first is the name of the route. The second is a Route object, which expects a URL path and some array of custom variables in its constructor. This array of custom variables can be anything that's significant to your application, and is returned when that route is matched.
The UrlMatcher::match()
returns the variables you set on the route as well as the route parameters.
Your application can now use this information to continue processing the request.
In addition to the configured variables, a _route
key is added, which holds
the name of the matched route.
If no matching route can be found, a ResourceNotFoundException will be thrown.
Defining Routes
A full route definition can contain up to eight parts:
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$route = new Route(
'/archive/{month}', // path
['_controller' => 'showArchive'], // default values
['month' => '[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}', 'subdomain' => 'www|m'], // requirements
[], // options
'{subdomain}.example.com', // host
[], // schemes
[], // methods
'context.getHost() matches "/(secure|admin).example.com/"' // condition
);
// ...
$parameters = $matcher->match('/archive/2012-01');
// [
// '_controller' => 'showArchive',
// 'month' => '2012-01',
// 'subdomain' => 'www',
// '_route' => ...
// ]
$parameters = $matcher->match('/archive/foo');
// throws ResourceNotFoundException
Route Collections
You can add routes or other instances of
RouteCollection to another collection.
This way you can build a tree of routes. Additionally you can define common
options for all routes of a subtree using methods provided by the
RouteCollection
class:
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$rootCollection = new RouteCollection();
$subCollection = new RouteCollection();
$subCollection->add(...);
$subCollection->add(...);
$subCollection->addPrefix('/prefix');
$subCollection->addDefaults([...]);
$subCollection->addRequirements([...]);
$subCollection->addOptions([...]);
$subCollection->setHost('{subdomain}.example.com');
$subCollection->setMethods(['POST']);
$subCollection->setSchemes(['https']);
$subCollection->setCondition('context.getHost() matches "/(secure|admin).example.com/"');
$rootCollection->addCollection($subCollection);
Setting the Request Parameters
The RequestContext provides information about the current request. You can define all parameters of an HTTP request with this class via its constructor:
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public function __construct(
$baseUrl = '',
$method = 'GET',
$host = 'localhost',
$scheme = 'http',
$httpPort = 80,
$httpsPort = 443,
$path = '/',
$queryString = ''
)
Normally you can pass the values from the $_SERVER
variable to populate the
RequestContext. But if you use the
HttpFoundation component, you can use its
Request class to feed the
RequestContext in a shortcut:
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use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;
$context = new RequestContext();
$context->fromRequest(Request::createFromGlobals());
Loading Routes
The Routing component comes with a number of loader classes, each giving you the ability to load a collection of route definitions from external resources.
File Routing Loaders
Each loader expects a FileLocator instance as the constructor argument. You can use the FileLocator to define an array of paths in which the loader will look for the requested files. If the file is found, the loader returns a RouteCollection.
If you're using the YamlFileLoader
, then route definitions look like this:
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# routes.yaml
route1:
path: /foo
controller: MyController::fooAction
methods: GET|HEAD
route2:
path: /foo/bar
controller: FooBarInvokableController
methods: PUT
To load this file, you can use the following code. This assumes that your
routes.yaml
file is in the same directory as the below code:
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use Symfony\Component\Config\FileLocator;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Loader\YamlFileLoader;
// looks inside *this* directory
$fileLocator = new FileLocator([__DIR__]);
$loader = new YamlFileLoader($fileLocator);
$routes = $loader->load('routes.yaml');
Besides YamlFileLoader there are two other loaders that work the same way:
If you use the PhpFileLoader you have to provide the name of a PHP file which returns a callable handling a RoutingConfigurator. This class allows to chain imports, collections or simple route definition calls:
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// RouteProvider.php
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Loader\Configurator\RoutingConfigurator;
return function (RoutingConfigurator $routes) {
$routes->add('route_name', '/foo')
->controller('ExampleController')
// ...
;
};
Closure Routing Loaders
There is also the ClosureLoader, which calls a closure and uses the result as a RouteCollection:
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use Symfony\Component\Routing\Loader\ClosureLoader;
$closure = function () {
return new RouteCollection();
};
$loader = new ClosureLoader();
$routes = $loader->load($closure);
Annotation Routing Loaders
Last but not least there are AnnotationDirectoryLoader and AnnotationFileLoader to load route definitions from class annotations:
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use Doctrine\Common\Annotations\AnnotationReader;
use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Routing\AnnotatedRouteControllerLoader;
use Symfony\Component\Config\FileLocator;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Loader\AnnotationDirectoryLoader;
$loader = new AnnotationDirectoryLoader(
new FileLocator(__DIR__.'/app/controllers/'),
new AnnotatedRouteControllerLoader(
new AnnotationReader()
)
);
$routes = $loader->load(__DIR__.'/app/controllers/');
// ...
Note
In order to use the annotation loader, you should have installed the
doctrine/annotations
and doctrine/cache
packages with Composer.
Tip
Annotation classes aren't loaded automatically, so you must load them using a class loader like this:
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use Composer\Autoload\ClassLoader;
use Doctrine\Common\Annotations\AnnotationRegistry;
/** @var ClassLoader $loader */
$loader = require __DIR__.'/../vendor/autoload.php';
AnnotationRegistry::registerLoader([$loader, 'loadClass']);
return $loader;
The all-in-one Router
The Router class is an all-in-one package to use the Routing component. The constructor expects a loader instance, a path to the main route definition and some other settings:
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public function __construct(
LoaderInterface $loader,
$resource,
array $options = [],
RequestContext $context = null,
LoggerInterface $logger = null
);
With the cache_dir
option you can enable route caching (if you provide a
path) or disable caching (if it's set to null
). The caching is done
automatically in the background if you want to use it. A basic example of the
Router class would look like:
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$fileLocator = new FileLocator([__DIR__]);
$requestContext = new RequestContext('/');
$router = new Router(
new YamlFileLoader($fileLocator),
'routes.yaml',
['cache_dir' => __DIR__.'/cache'],
$requestContext
);
$parameters = $router->match('/foo/bar');
$url = $router->generate('some_route', ['parameter' => 'value']);
Note
If you use caching, the Routing component will compile new classes which
are saved in the cache_dir
. This means your script must have write
permissions for that location.
Learn more
- Routing
- How to Create a custom Route Loader
- Looking up Routes from a Database: Symfony CMF DynamicRouter
- Controller
- Extending Action Argument Resolving
- How to Customize Error Pages
- How to Forward Requests to another Controller
- How to Define Controllers as Services
- How to Create a SOAP Web Service in a Symfony Controller
- How to Upload Files