Symfony is an application framework written in PHP that can be used to create robust web applications. The Symfony framework consists of numerous reusable components, many of which Drupal 8 includes in its core library. Learning Symfony will help you advance your skills as a web developer as well as give you a greater understanding of how things work "under the hood" in Drupal 8.
What is Symfony?
Symfony is a set of PHP Components, a Web Application framework, a Philosophy, and a Community -- all working together in harmony.
What are Symfony Components?
A set of decoupled and reusable components on which the best PHP applications are built, such as Drupal, phpBB, and eZ Publish.
Example tasks
- Create PHP web applications using best practices
- Create routes and controllers
- Create and use special PHP objects called services
- Organize code into reusable chunks
Confidence
Drupalize.Me includes resources for learning Symfony versions 2 and 3 produced by our friends Ryan Weaver--Symfony documentation lead--and Leanna Pelham at KnpUniversity. The current version of Symfony is 3, but Drupal 8.3 and earlier use Symfony 2 components, so we have included tutorials for both versions. The official Symfony documentation is the canonical source and should be consulted in conjunction with other training materials.
Drupalize.Me resources
External resources
- Symfony (official) (symfony.com)
- The official home of the Symfony project. Learn about the Symfony framework, components, philosophy, and community.
- Symfony Documentation (symfony.com)
- The official source of Symfony documentation.
- Symfony in Drupal 8 (sitepoint.com)
- This is a good overview of which components are in Drupal core. Also see the issues below for more complete and updated information on versions and updates.
- Issue: Update Symfony components to ~3.2 and Issue: Update Symfony components to 3.2.8 (drupal.org)
- Symfony 3 will be included in Drupal 8 as of 8.4.x.