Blog

Symfony's Cache Contracts have a mysterious third argument: $beta. Here's where its name comes from, how it prevents cache stampedes, and how beta: INF lets you force a cache item to refresh without throwing away the value you already have.

A practical, modern GitHub Actions setup for Symfony apps, covering tests, linting, static analysis, database checks, Symfony-aware diagnostics, and scheduled dependency security audits.

Real browser. Real JavaScript. No web server?! Playwright-PHP's Symfony integration sends browser requests directly through your Symfony kernel, unlocking fast, parallel browser tests with the same kind of access and control we love from Symfony's kernel tests. It's kind of blowing my mind.

Brontie is a new AI assistant for SymfonyCasts. Learn how we built it, how it works, and how you can get involved.

Doctrine entities in Symfony often double as form models, forcing required properties to become nullable and allowing invalid states required by Symfony forms. Let's explore how DTOs (Data Transfer Objects) and Symfony's ObjectMapper component can help keep our entities honest.

Meet Brontie - your new SymfonyCasts companion. Part dinosaur, part AI, fully obsessed with Symfony. Mention @Brontie in any tutorial, course, or blog post comment and Brontie will jump in with answers grounded in the actual SymfonyCasts lessons.

Symfony upgrades do not have to be stressful. Thanks to Symfony's deprecation system, you can fix future breaking changes before upgrading. Learn why "no deprecations" is the key to a safe major upgrade - and how Symfony gives you a clear roadmap forward.

Composer 2.9 turns security the next level. Instead of politely warning about vulnerable dependencies, it now blocks insecure installs and updates by default, forcing issues to surface early and keeping your PHP projects safer without extra tools.

Add extra context to your PHP classes with zenstruck/class-metadata. This lightweight package lets you define short, readable identifiers for your classes - known as aliases - and attach custom metadata directly to them.

With deep sadness, we share that Ryan Weaver — co-founder of SymfonyCasts, father, husband, beloved teacher, and friend — has passed away after a long and courageous journey with brain cancer.

The Symfony CLI makes local development a breeze - but it works best when PHP is installed directly on your machine. Let's walk through setting up PHP (plus common database extensions) and the Symfony CLI on macOS, Linux, or Windows so you're ready to start building Symfony apps.

The mailto: link is a simple way to open an email client with a pre-filled email. But what if you want this email to have a pre-filled attachment? Let's dive into how to do this with Symfony Mailer.

The free Mailtrap tutorial is here! It's all about the Mailer & Webhook components with the joy of previewing emails in a sandbox. As a bonus, this tutorial triggered several contributions back to Symfony!

This month we've got 6 SymfonyCasts open source releases, let's take a quick look at what's new and give a huge thanks to all the contributors who helped make these releases happen!

Now that you've created a Symfony reproducer, let's use it to fix a bug in Symfony or verify a fix proposed by someone else. We'll fork the Symfony repository, link our reproducer to it, and make the necessary changes.

Oh snap! You've discovered what you suspect is a bug in Symfony. Don't despair, Symfony is open source so there are many ways you can help get it resolved. Let's look at how to create a reproducer to help other contributors understand the issue and find a solution.

Kevin Bond (aka Zenstruck) is joining forces with us as a head tutorial writer. This means tutorials created by Kevin in the SymfonyCasts style you know and love. It also means the ability for us to make more content about more libraries and solutions around the Symfony ecosystem.

Bad News: Ryan has incurable brain cancer. Good News: SymfonyCasts is still going strong. Best news: we're fighting it with everything we've got & have amazing support from the community.

Live stream from Feb 28th where we get some updates on the "active value" change in Turbo 8 morphing. Then we dive into work on a PR for the autocomplete component: making it morph-ready... which is tricky!

When you redirect from a LiveAction, LiveComponents, naturally, will perform a full page redirect (or redirect via Turbo if it's available. But what if you want to navigate a Turbo frame? The answer lies in some clever use of Turbo Streams.

Live stream from Feb 20th where we do some open source maintenance on Symfony UX, merge some PR's then finish the data-live-action-args pull request that we first discussed several weeks ago. Good work towards LiveComponents stable!

Live stream from Feb 14th where we dive Turbo 8, view transitions, and "morphing": the key tech behind LiveComponents & a new feature in Turbo 8. We work on how to make our Stimulus controllers morph-ready.

Live stream from Feb 7th where we dive into the JavaScript behind the Live Components package: the Stimulus controller, Component objects, how re-rendering happens & the internal plugins system. Yes, this one gets TECHY.

Live stream from Jan 31st where we talk about Twig attribute syntax proposal, the new "URL" binding feature in LiveComponents and then dive into building a "Tooltip" Twig component / recipe for a proposed new section of the UX site.

Live stream from Jan 24th where we talk about HTTP caching, brainstorming the "attributes" variable for Twig Component & some hacking on our internal tutorial-building tool: TutsHero.

Using Doctrine's HIDDEN doesn't come up often but it is a great tool to have when you need it!

Live stream from Jan 17th where we talk about the steps to getting live components to a stable release and triage a few technical issues.

Let's peek back at 2023: the tutorials we created & the open source initiatives that you helped us push forward.

Want your site to fly? Preload your assets! This happens automatically in AssetMapper, but let's learn how it works anyway!

To celebrate the release of Symfony 7 & a stable AssetMapper, we're releasing a 30 day LAST stack tutorial starting December 1st. And, it's free until Jan 15th! Share the love.

Combining files to minimize requests is a relic to of the past. It's time to stop.

One of the biggest reasons to use a bundler is import and export. But guess what? These work in your browser just fine.`

Introducing LAST Stack: A simple, no-build, high-performance, stack made up of Live Components, AssetMapper, Stimulus & Turbo.

Tap into the most powerful source of knowledge in the world: your cat!

We're happy to announce that from now on we'll deliver Spanish translations to our new tutorials (scripts and subtitles)... pretty much instantly!

Nos complace anunciar que a partir de ahora entregaremos traducciones al español de nuestros nuevos tutoriales (guiones y subtítulos)... prácticamente al instante!

Does your giant migrations/ folder bother you? Let's do some spring cleaning! A tip about how to get rid of a huge set of old migration files in your project, without blowing up your database.

En SymfonyCasts nos arremangamos y traducimos nuestro popular curso de Symfony 5 para que puedas disfrutarlo gratuitamente sin tener que activar el traductor universal!

You don't have to go to the Zoo to see the Panther in action. All you need is Composer and some time to configure things properly!

Got issues with Behat running on Symfony 5 or higher? Want to know more about its configuration and possibilities? You are in the right spot!

The Symfony World videos are available with high-quality captions, but not in SymfonyCasts this year!

Curious what versions of a library a tutorial is using? Every tutorial now exposes the full composer.json and package.json info!

We are motivated by the message and momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement that is happening worldwide and in the US.

After mis-typing SymfonyCasts as SymfonyCATS... about a million times, we decided it was easier just to go with it.

Did you attend SymfonyCon and want to re-watch stuff? Or maybe you missed it and need to catch up? Either way, SymfonyCon 2018 videos are here!

We've got some big news! KnpUniversity is now SymfonyCasts! Find out what this means, and why we're excited!

We've been getting many requests lately from our users about a bookmarking feature, and now it's ready!

Making our content friendly & accessible is super important. That's why we've just added English subtitles & course thumbnails!

2018 = Symfony 4 Development

2017 was the biggest year yet for KnpUniversity!

New Release: PHPUnit with a Bite & we hope to see you in Cluj!

New releases, upcoming tutorials, and upcoming Symfony events we want you to know about in October!

Symfony 3.3 comes with some great new config in services.yml. But, if you're coding along with our tutorials, this code may cause some issues! Find out how to keep coding along happily.

Say hello to KnpUOAuth2ClientBundle: Social connect, social authentication, social registration - do it all, easily and without frustration.

Yea yea yea, Drupal 8 is out. But more than that, Drupal people are awesome. So let me tell you about how I met them...

Drupal 8 is here! Now get to work with video tutorials and coding challenges for Drupal, OO coding and more. All free until Dec 25th.

Not only is running Behat on CircleCI easy, with just a few lines of code, you can get screenshots when a test fails.

Symfony's Console component can be used in a single, standalone file to add colors, build a table or add a progress bar with a beer icon.

The Symfony Form property_path option is one of the most under-appreciated, and powerful parts of the form component.

PhpStorm Live Templates: where you type a word, hit tab, and it expands into a full code-block, saving you time on all the code you write over and over again. We've published a few of our favorites, and are hoping you'll share yours.

Introducing Guard: Authentication any way you want, customize the heck out of every part, and come out smiling. It's Symfony's security system unleashed!

Symfony 2.7 has landed! Learn how we upgraded to the latest LTS and what hiccups we hit along the way.

Did you know you can inject a Doctrine repository into a service without registering it as a service? How about injecting scalar values are arguments that live in the database? If not, you may have missed Symfony's Expression Language.

I switched from Assetic to Gulp to get more features and better support. In this post, I'll' tell you why there's a good chance that switching to Gulp is a good decision for you too. And, I'll give you a quick, 3-step intro to Gulp itself.

We're giving our code-blocks a face-lift to show the filename and folded lines you can expand to see the entire file.

The new AppBundle in Symfony is controversial, but I'm not sure it should be. In this post, I'll show you why it exists, why bundles are just directories, and how close we are to having no bundles at all. Sound crazy? It might just change the way you think about your app.

The KnpU All Access Pass ... ooohhh ahhhh. Introducing binge-watching and more frequent content. Build something amazing!

Composer's require command just learned how to guess the best version for you. So update your library docs to have a one-line installation! And then have a sandwich.

Drupal 8 changes a lot under the hood and those will make you a happier and more productive developer. But don't wait for its release to kick butt in the new world. That's right, just learn Symfony.

Collaboration on software is huge, and we all enjoy the benefits. So why don't we see more with documentation? I'll tell you where I think tutorials & collaboration are going and what prevents us from getting there. But I also want to know what keeps you from writing tutorials and collaborating.

Inspired by an old StackOverflow post, we'll investigate why it's so hard to get all of the errors of a form and unlock some new tricks by understanding the form hierarchy.

At SymfonyCon Warsaw, I talked about RequireJS, Bower and Grunt in your PHP project. In this post, we'll go a bit further and check out a way to organize things that may be even better!

We have an RSS feed! Ok, that's not earth-shattering, but we will be sharing tech experiences, updates, and other tech topics and we don't want you to miss out. We also talk about the code behind the RSS.

After our recent "What the REST" post, a lot of people came out to help answer the most difficult questions around creating a RESTful API. In this post, I outline what we learned and what questions remain before we release our REST tutorial.

We're releasing the content of our screencasts and we want to get the license right. In this post, we give a little background and ask for your thoughts.

REST is as deep as the rabbit hole, with varied approaches and undefined best-practices. Should I use custom hypermedia types or something like HAL or JSON-LD? Should I implement OPTIONS? What role should the API documentation play and what information should be described inside the API itself? In this post, I'm asking for help.

Sometimes, learning something technical is just plain hard. Information is scattered, opinions vary, and best-practices are buried. Nothing tells the whole, realistic story in a real world application. We work together on open source libraries, but not on tutorials. So now, we're excited to enter our next phase, where it's all about collaboration and working together!