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06.

Environments

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We're kind of abusing the debug flag: it's mostly used to tell Symfony if it should hide/show errors. If you want to control how your app behaves while developing versus on production, that's normally done with environments: the prod environment will turn on caching and turn off debugging tools. The dev environment will do the opposite.

When debug is false, the web debug toolbar is basically off, but the WebProfilerBundle is still being loaded. That's a bit wasteful: why not only instantiate this in the dev environment?

Add if $this->getEnvironment() == 'dev': let's only load the bundle in that scenario:

48 lines | AppKernel.php
// ... lines 1 - 6
class AppKernel extends Kernel
{
public function registerBundles()
{
// ... lines 11 - 17
if ($this->getEnvironment() == 'dev') {
$bundles[] = new \Symfony\Bundle\WebProfilerBundle\WebProfilerBundle();
}
// ... lines 21 - 22
}
// ... lines 24 - 46
}

Change .env back to ENV equals dev and DEBUG equals 1. Refresh now: no issues.

Now change the environment to prod and refresh. Ah, error:

There is no extension able to load the configuration for web_profiler.

This makes sense: now that the WebProfilerBundle is not being loaded in the prod environment, Symfony doesn't know how to handle the web_profiler section in config.yml. The full stack Symfony framework solves this by having environment-specific config_dev.yml and config_prod.yml files. But I've gotta keep things small. So, I'll show you a trick.

Conditional Configuration with a Trick

Find registerContainerConfiguration() and add a new $isDevEnv variable that uses the same getEnvironment() method from before. Next, use $loader->load() to load more configuration. But instead of passing it a file, pass it a Closure that accepts a ContainerBuilder argument. Add the use statement on top. Also add a use on the Closure so we have acccess to $isDevEnv:

48 lines | AppKernel.php
// ... lines 1 - 4
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\ContainerBuilder;
// ... line 6
class AppKernel extends Kernel
{
// ... lines 9 - 24
public function registerContainerConfiguration(LoaderInterface $loader)
{
$loader->load(__DIR__.'/config/config.yml');
$isDevEnvironment = $this->getEnvironment() == 'dev';
// do some dynamic customizations
$loader->load(function (ContainerBuilder $container) use ($isDevEnvironment) {
// ... lines 33 - 44
});
}
}

Now when Symfony loads, it'll load everything from config.yml, but it'll also call this function, and we can control whatever extra configuration we want. In config.yml, we can't have the web_profiler stuff because this file is always loaded. Remove that:

[[ code('7dc1f3ad36') ]]

But inside the Closure, we can say: if we're in the dev environment, then call $container->loadFromExtension() to pass in the configuration we want. Use web_profiler as the first agument and an array as the second with toolbar => true:

48 lines | AppKernel.php
// ... lines 1 - 6
class AppKernel extends Kernel
{
// ... lines 9 - 24
public function registerContainerConfiguration(LoaderInterface $loader)
{
// ... lines 27 - 28
$isDevEnvironment = $this->getEnvironment() == 'dev';
// ... lines 30 - 31
$loader->load(function (ContainerBuilder $container) use ($isDevEnvironment) {
if ($isDevEnvironment) {
$container->loadFromExtension('web_profiler', array(
'toolbar' => true,
));
}
// ... lines 38 - 44
});
}
}

That should take care of the first error, so refresh. Closer - that error is gone, but now there's an error loading the wdt.xml routing file. Again, this makes sense: we're still loading some routes from @WebProfilerBundle, which simply doesn't exist in the prod environment:

12 lines | config/routing.yml
// ... lines 1 - 4
_wdt:
resource: "@WebProfilerBundle/Resources/config/routing/wdt.xml"
prefix: /_wdt
_profiler:
resource: "@WebProfilerBundle/Resources/config/routing/profiler.xml"
prefix: /_profiler

To fix this, create a routing_dev.yml file, move the two WebProfilerBundle imports there, and at the bottom, import the main routing.yml file:

13 lines | config/routing_dev.yml
# this is "dev-only" debugging routes:
# you probably don't want to put anything else in this file
_wdt:
resource: "@WebProfilerBundle/Resources/config/routing/wdt.xml"
prefix: /_wdt
_profiler:
resource: "@WebProfilerBundle/Resources/config/routing/profiler.xml"
prefix: /_profiler
_main:
resource: routing.yml

Now, do you remember where we told Symfony to load routing.yml? It's in config.yml:

12 lines | config/config.yml
framework:
// ... line 2
router:
resource: '%kernel.root_dir%/config/routing.yml'
// ... lines 5 - 12

In all cases, we're loading routing.yml. But now we need to do something conditional: in dev, we want to load routing_dev.yml. Otherwise, we want to load routing.yml. And again, we can do this in AppKernel: this is the spot you'll go to if you need to configure something environment-specific.

If we're in the dev environment, call $container->loadFromextension(). This time, we need to tweak the framework configuration to override the router.resource value. In the array, add a router key, set it to an array, then add resource and set it to routing_dev.yml:

49 lines | AppKernel.php
// ... lines 1 - 6
class AppKernel extends Kernel
{
// ... lines 9 - 24
public function registerContainerConfiguration(LoaderInterface $loader)
{
// ... lines 27 - 28
$isDevEnvironment = $this->getEnvironment() == 'dev';
// ... lines 30 - 31
$loader->load(function (ContainerBuilder $container) use ($isDevEnvironment) {
// ... lines 33 - 38
if ($isDevEnvironment) {
$container->loadFromExtension('framework', array(
'router' => array(
'resource' => '%kernel.root_dir%/config/routing_dev.yml',
)
));
}
});
}
}

In every environment, we load config.yml. But in the dev environment, we override the router resource config.

Remember, we're in the prod environment. Refresh. No errors, no web debug toolbar. Change the environment back to dev and refresh. Whoops: it doesn't like my webprofiler configuration because that's a typo! Make sure you have web_profiler:

49 lines | AppKernel.php
// ... lines 1 - 24
public function registerContainerConfiguration(LoaderInterface $loader)
{
// ... lines 27 - 33
$container->loadFromExtension('web_profiler', array(
'toolbar' => true,
));
// ... lines 37 - 46
}
// ... lines 48 - 49

Now it's happy, I'm happy and we have the toolbar.

The power of the environment is that we can have two different sets of configuration right on one machine, and toggling between them is effortless. But to minimize files, we'll keep all the environmental differences inside this Closure.

Parameters in dotenv

There's one more trick to configuration. In config.yml we have a secret key. This should be big, long, random and - of course - secret. It should not be committed to the repository. Normally, we'd set this to a parameter - like %secret%:

9 lines | config/config.yml
framework:
secret: %secret%
// ... lines 3 - 9

Then, we'd add this to our parameters.yml file and be done. But no more! We can do this in .env.

If I add SECRET = CHANGEME, that'll create an environment variable called SECRET, but it will not automatically create a Symfony parameter called secret. If I refresh, we see the error:

You have requested a non-existent parameter "secret".

Normally, parameters are created by adding a parameters key in any configuration file and listing them below. But we don't want to put this stuff here.

The secret is that if you prefix any environment variable with SYMFONY__, Symfony will take what's after that and automatically turn that into a parameter:

7 lines | .env
// ... lines 1 - 4
# parameters (SYMFONY__ is mapped to parameters)
SYMFONY__SECRET=CHANGEME

Refresh. Now it works perfectly. Goodbye parameters.yml, hello .env with SYMFONY__ used as the prefix.

And don't forget to put this line in the .env.example file so new developers have a chance to get things setup:

7 lines | .env.example
// ... lines 1 - 4
# parameters (SYMFONY__ is mapped to parameters)
SYMFONY__SECRET=CHANGEME