Symfony 4: Services

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    Symfony 4: Services with Ryan Weaver
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    It’s time to talk about the most fundamental part
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    of Symfony: Services.
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    Honestly, Symfony is nothing more than a bunch
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    of useful objects that work together.
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    For example, there is a router object that matches routes
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    and generates URLs.
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    There's a Twig object that renders templates
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    and there's a logger object that Symfony is already using internally
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    to store things in a var/log/dev.log file.
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    Actually, everything in Symfony,
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    I mean everything, is done by one of these useful objects.
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    And these useful objects have a special name, Services.
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    But don’t get too excited about that word, Service.
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    It’s a special word for a really simple idea.
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    A service is any object that does work, like generating URLs,
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    sending e-mails, or saving things to a database.
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    Symfony comes with a huge number of services,
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    and I want you to think of services as your tools.
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    Like, if I gave you the Logger service, or object,
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    then you could use it to log messages.
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    If I gave you a Mailer service, you could send some e-mails.
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    Tools – the entire second half of Symfony is all about learning
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    where to find these services and how to use them.
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    Every time you learn about a new service,
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    you get a new tool,
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    and become just a little bit more dangerous.
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    Let’s check out the logging system.
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    Find your terminal, and run, tail –f var/log/dev.log.
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    I’ll clear the screen.
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    Now, refresh the page and move back.
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    Awesome!
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    This proves that Symfony has some sort of logging system,
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    and since everything is done by a service,
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    there must be a logger object.
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    So, here’s the question,
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    how can we get the logger service so that we can log our own messages?
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    Here’s the answer.
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    Inside the controller, on the method, add an additional argument.
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    Give it a logger interface type hint, hit tab to autocomplete that,
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    and call it whatever you want.
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    How about logger?
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    Remember, when you autocomplete,
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    PhpStorm adds the use statement to the top for you.
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    Now, we can use one of its methods:
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    logger->info (‘Article is being hearted’):
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    Before we talk about this, let’s try it.
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    Find your browser and click the heart.
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    That hit the Ajax endpoint.
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    Go back to the terminal.
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    Yes!
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    There it is at the bottom.
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    Hit CTRL+C to exit tail.
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    OK cool!
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    But how the heck did that work?
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    Here’s the deal.
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    Before Symfony executes our controller, it looks at each argument.
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    For simple arguments like $slug,
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    it passes us the wildcard value from the router.
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    But for logger, it looks at the type hint and realizes
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    that we want Symfony to pass us the logger object.
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    Oh, and the order of the arguments does not matter.
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    This is a very powerful idea called Autowiring.
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    If you need a service object,
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    you just need to know the correct type hint to use.
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    So, how the heck did I know to use logger interface?
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    Well, of course,
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    if you look at the official Symfony docs about the logger,
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    it'll tell you, but there is a cooler way.
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    Go to your terminal and run, ./bin/console debug:autowiring.
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    Boom!
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    This is a full list of all of the type hints
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    that you can use to get a service.
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    Notice that most of them say that they are an alias to something.
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    Don’t worry about that too much.
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    Like routes, each service
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    has an internal name you can use to reference it.
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    We’ll learn more about that later.
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    oh, and whenever you install a new package,
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    you’ll get more and more services in this list – more tools.
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    And check this out,
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    if you want to get the Twig service,
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    you can use either of these 2 type hints.
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    And remember how I said that everything in Symfony
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    is done by a service?
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    Well, when we call $this ->render in a controller,
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    that’s just a short cut
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    to fetch the Twig service and call a method on it.
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    In fact, let’s pretend
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    that the $this ->render shortcut does not exist,
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    how could we render a template?
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    No problem!
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    We just need the Twig service.
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    Add a second argument with an Environment type hint
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    because that’s the class name we saw in debug:autowiring.
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    Call the arg $twigEnvironment.
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    Next, change the return statement to be $html = twigEnvironment->render.
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    The method we want to call on the Twig object is coincidentally
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    the same as the controller shortcut.
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    Then at the bottom, return_new Response and pass $html
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    OK, this is way more work than before,
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    and I would not do this in a real project,
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    but I wanted to prove a point.
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    When you use the $this->render shortcut method on the controller,
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    all it really does is call render on the Twig service
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    and then wrap it inside a response object for you.
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    Try it.
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    Go back and refresh the page.
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    It works exactly like before.
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    Of course, we will use shortcut methods
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    because they make our life way more awesome.
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    I’ll change my code back to look like it did before.
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    But the point is this: everything is done by a service.
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    If you learn to master services,
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    you can do anything from anywhere in Symfony.
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    There's a lot more to say about the topic of services
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    and so many other parts of Symfony:
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    Configuration, Doctrine and the Database, Forms, Security,
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    and APIs, just to name a few.
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    The Space Bar is far from being the galactic information source
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    that we know it will be.
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    But congrats,
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    you just spent an hour getting an awesome foundation in Symfony.
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    You will not regret your hard work.
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    You're on your way to building great things,
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    and as always, becoming a better and better developer.

Stellar Development with Symfony 4

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Symfony 4: Services

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7 minutes 35 seconds // HDCC //

In this tutorial, we'll learn about useful objects in Symfony known as services.

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