The document provides tips to improve the developer experience when working with the Symfony framework. It recommends following code style standards like PSR-1 and PSR-2. It also suggests preferring clean naming over comments, avoiding business logic in controllers, using PHPStorm as an IDE, and leveraging new PHP features. Additional recommendations include not overusing interfaces, avoiding injecting the service container, using one bundle per application, and following the Symfony best practices guide.

1. Some tips to improve
developer experience
with Symfony
by Artem Kolesnikov (@tyomo4ka)
1

2. Common
recommendations
2

3. Code style
• Symfony uses PSR-1 and PSR-2
• Symfony extends PSRs with Symfony Coding
Standards
• PHP CS Fixer supports PSRs and Symfony
• Broken windows theory
3

4. Prefer clean naming to
comments
• "Every time you write a comment, you should
grimace and feel the failure of your ability of
expression." © Robert C. Martin "Clean code"
• Always comment complex and not obvious logic
• Remove obsolete comments
• Never commit commented unused code
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5. Avoid business logic in
controllers
• Fat stupid ugly controllers (FSUC)
// FSUC
public function updateUserAction(User $user, $userData)
{
$user->updateFromArray($userData);
$this->getDoctrine()->getManager()->flush($user);
}
// OK
public function updateUserAction(User $user, $userData)
{
$this->get('user_manager')->update($user, $userData);
}
5

6. Use PHP Storm IDE
• Code analysis
• Great Symfony2 plugin
• Plugins for Behat, composer
• And much, much more
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7. Use PHP syntax sugar and
new features
• Short syntax for arrays
• Other syntactic sugar
• Traits
$options = ['yes', 'no'];
$user = (new User())->setEmail('tyomo4ka@gmail.com');
$headers = $this->getRequest()['headers'];
return $result ?: [];
7

8. Don't use interfaces when
you don't need it
• Dependency on abstract class works as well
• Introduce interface is much simpler than remove
• Interfaces for everything...
8

9. Symfony specific
recommendations
9

10. Don't inject service container
in business logic services
/** Service which does not depend on Container */
class UserManager
{
private $em;
public function __construct(EntityManager $em)
{
$this->em = $em;
}
}
/** Service which depends on Container */
class UserManager
{
private $container;
public function __construct(ContainerInterface $container)
{
$this->container = $container;
}
}
10

11. Use one bundle for
application
• Recommendation from
"Official Symfony Best
Practices"
• AppBundle vs App
• use AppEntityUser;
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12. Always use param
converters
• Param convert works using request attributes
public function someAction(ContextEntity $entity) {}
• Don't write action like this
public function deleteTagAction()
{
$this->get('xxx.tag_manager')->deleteTagFromStream(
$this->getRequest()->get('stream_id'),
$this->getRequest()->get('tag_id')
);
}
• This looks much cleaner
public function deleteTagAction(Stream $stream, Tag $tag)
{
$this->get('xxx.tag_manager')
->deleteTagFromStream($stream, $tag)
;
}
12

13. Prefer security voters to ACL
• Each ACL check requires requests to DB
• Voters are simple
interface VoterInterface
{
function supportsAttribute($attribute);
function supportsClass($class);
function vote(TokenInterface $token, $object, array $attributes);
}
• Abstract voter (Symfony 2.6+)
abstract class AbstractVoter implements VoterInterface
{
abstract protected function getSupportedClasses();
abstract protected function getSupportedAttributes();
abstract protected function isGranted($attribute, $object, $user = null);
}
13

14. Prefer Grunt or Gulp to Assetic
if you have reach front-end
• Assetic is good if you don't have too much
assets
• Cool like a Frontend Developer: Grunt,
RequireJS, Bower and other Tools by Ryan
Weaver (slides and video)
14

15. Recommendations from
"Official Symfony Best
Practices"
15

16. Always use Composer
to install Symfony
16

17. Configuration management
• Use constants to define configuration options
that rarely change
• Don't define a semantic dependency injection
configuration for your bundles
17

18. Services definitions
• The name of your application's services should be
as short as possible, ideally just one simple word
• Use the YAML format to define your own services
• Don't define parameters for the classes of your
services
<parameter key="jms_serializer.metadata.file_locator.class">
MetadataDriverFileLocator
</parameter>
18

19. Configuration format
• Use annotations to define the mapping
information of the Doctrine entities
• Use annotations to configure routing, caching
and security whenever possible
• Don't use the @Template() annotation to
configure the template used by the controller
19

20. Templating
• Use Twig templating format for your templates
• PHP templating engine will be removed in the
future
• Store all your application's templates in app/
Resources/views/ directory
20

21. Some other official recommendations
• Define your forms as PHP classes
• Always use keys for translations instead of
content strings
{{ 'project_name' |trans }} // Good
{{ 'Project name' |trans }} // Not good
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22. Some services to improve
quality of your projects
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23. Codeship CI
http://codeship.io
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24. Travis CI
https://travis-ci.org/
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25. SensioLabs Insight
https://insight.sensiolabs.com/
25

26. Scrutinizer CI
https://scrutinizer-ci.com
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27. Check new bundles while
your drinking your morning coffee
Check new bundles while your drinking
your morning coffee
http://knpbundles.com/
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28. And finally my favorite
joke about developers :)
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29. The first year
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30. The second year
30

31. The third year
31

32. The fifth year
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33. The tens year
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34. Thanks!
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