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Lean and Mean Dev with PhpStorm (for Symfony)

Annotations

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We've got a big project today, a site about movies. But only movies that have Samuel L. Jackson.

Tip

The "Controller" option when you create a new file is no longer available. However, you can use php bin/console make:controller from MakerBundle as an even nicer option.

We'll start by creating a MovieController. We could right click on the Controller directory, go to new, and select file from the menu. But we can be faster! For Mac users, use ⌘+N to get the "new" menu open. And because we have the Symfony Plugin, by typing 'controller' you'll find an option to create one directly. Let's keep things simple and obvious and call it MovieController.

14 lines src/AppBundle/Controller/MovieController.php
<?php
namespace AppBundle\Controller;
use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\Controller;
class MovieController extends Controller
{
public function indexAction($name)
{
return $this->render('', array('name' => $name));
}
}

Ah, and when you use Git, PHPStorm asks you whether you want to add new files to git. I prefer to just do this myself so I'll click 'no'. Beautiful!

Auto-complete Annotations

We'll need a route to this MovieController, so add some annotations above indexAction(). Let's change these to @Route and let autocomplete do its thing. The one we want is Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\Configuration\Route, select that option and hit tab and notice that it added a use statement on line 5:

18 lines src/AppBundle/Controller/MovieController.php
... lines 1 - 4
use Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\Configuration\Route;
... lines 6 - 7
class MovieController extends Controller
{
/**
* @Route("/movies/new")
*/
public function newAction()
... lines 14 - 16
}

That's really important because when you use annotations you need to have a use statement for them. Now instead of spending your time looking it up in the documentation, autocomplete will take care of it for you. Robots FTW!

Let's have our path be /movies/new and change indexAction() to newAction() because this controller will render a "new movie" form. And we'll fix up our render call in a second:

18 lines src/AppBundle/Controller/MovieController.php
... lines 1 - 9
/**
* @Route("/movies/new")
*/
public function newAction()
{
return $this->render('', array());
}
... lines 17 - 18

Head over to the browser and check if our new route is hitting our endpoint. Perfect! It can't find the template but that's fine because, there isn't one :)

Annotation Options

Annotations have a lot of options and one of them here is called name, which auto-completes for us. Hey thanks. Fill that in with movies_new:

18 lines src/AppBundle/Controller/MovieController.php
... lines 1 - 9
/**
* @Route("/movies/new", name="movies_new")
*/
public function newAction()
... lines 14 - 18

If you're the curious sort and are wondering what other options you have, just hold the control key and hit the space bar: that will bring up all the options that you have in that spot. In fact, "control+space" can be used pretty much anywhere to show you your auto-complete option - really handy.

This autocomplete works for two reasons. First, an annotation represents a real class. Hold command, or control if you're in windows, and click @Route to open up the class that fuels it.

45 lines vendor/sensio/framework-extra-bundle/Configuration/Route.php
... lines 1 - 11
namespace Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\Configuration;
... lines 13 - 19
class Route extends BaseRoute
{
... lines 22 - 43
}

If you hold command again and go into its base class, you'll see that all of those options are represented as properties inside of that class:

183 lines vendor/symfony/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/Routing/Annotation/Route.php
... lines 1 - 11
namespace Symfony\Component\Routing\Annotation;
... lines 13 - 21
class Route
{
private $path;
private $name;
private $requirements = array();
private $options = array();
private $defaults = array();
private $host;
private $methods = array();
private $schemes = array();
private $condition;
... lines 33 - 181
}

To take this further if you go back to MovieController you can hold command and click on the name option and have it take you right to that property. You may not need this very often, but sometimes it's useful to see how an annotation option is used to figure out what value you want to set for it.

Now thanks to the annotations plugin, annotations act a lot more like normal code, with fancy auto-completion and other goodies.

Leave a comment!

This is an older tutorial using an older version of PhpStorm. However, most of the tricks we show in PhpStorm still work beautifully.
Symfony 2

What PHP libraries does this tutorial use?

// composer.json
{
    "require": {
        "php": ">=5.3.9, <7.3.0",
        "symfony/symfony": "2.8.*", // v2.8.15
        "doctrine/orm": "^2.4.8", // v2.4.8
        "doctrine/dbal": "<2.5", // v2.4.5
        "doctrine/doctrine-bundle": "~1.4", // 1.6.4
        "symfony/assetic-bundle": "~2.3", // v2.8.1
        "symfony/swiftmailer-bundle": "~2.3,>=2.3.10", // v2.4.2
        "symfony/monolog-bundle": "^3.0.2", // v3.0.2
        "sensio/distribution-bundle": "~5.0", // v5.0.17
        "sensio/framework-extra-bundle": "^3.0.2", // v3.0.18
        "incenteev/composer-parameter-handler": "~2.0" // v2.1.2
    },
    "require-dev": {
        "sensio/generator-bundle": "~3.0", // v3.1.2
        "symfony/phpunit-bridge": "~2.7" // v2.8.15
    }
}
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