How to Use Matchers to Enable the Profiler Conditionally

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The Symfony profiler is only activated in the development environment to not hurt your application performance. However, sometimes it may be useful to conditionally enable the profiler in the production environment to assist you in debugging issues. This behavior is implemented with the Request Matchers.

Using the built-in Matcher

A request matcher is a class that checks whether a given Request instance matches a set of conditions. Symfony provides a built-in matcher which matches paths and IPs. For example, if you want to only show the profiler when accessing the page with the 168.0.0.1 IP, then you can use this configuration:

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# app/config/config.yml
framework:
    # ...
    profiler:
        matcher:
            ip: 168.0.0.1

You can also set a path option to define the path on which the profiler should be enabled. For instance, setting it to ^/admin/ will enable the profiler only for the URLs which start with /admin/.

Creating a Custom Matcher

Leveraging the concept of Request Matchers you can define a custom matcher to enable the profiler conditionally in your application. To do so, create a class which implements RequestMatcherInterface. This interface requires one method: matches(). This method returns false when the request doesn't match the conditions and true otherwise. Therefore, the custom matcher must return false to disable the profiler and true to enable it.

Suppose that the profiler must be enabled whenever a user with a ROLE_SUPER_ADMIN is logged in. This is the only code needed for that custom matcher:

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// src/AppBundle/Profiler/SuperAdminMatcher.php
namespace AppBundle\Profiler;

use Symfony\Component\Security\Core\Authorization\AuthorizationCheckerInterface;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\RequestMatcherInterface;

class SuperAdminMatcher implements RequestMatcherInterface
{
    protected $authorizationChecker;

    public function __construct(AuthorizationCheckerInterface $authorizationChecker)
    {
        $this->authorizationChecker = $authorizationChecker;
    }

    public function matches(Request $request)
    {
        return $this->authorizationChecker->isGranted('ROLE_SUPER_ADMIN');
    }
}

Then, configure a new service and set it as private because the application won't use it directly:

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# app/config/services.yml
services:
    app.super_admin_matcher:
        class: AppBundle\Profiler\SuperAdminMatcher
        arguments: ['@security.authorization_checker']
        public: false

Once the service is registered, the only thing left to do is configure the profiler to use this service as the matcher:

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# app/config/config.yml
framework:
    # ...
    profiler:
        matcher:
            service: app.super_admin_matcher
This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.
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