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07.

Debugging with the Amazing Profiler

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Symfony boasts some of the most epic debugging tools of all the Internet. But because Symfony apps start so small, we don't even have them installed yet. Time to fix that. Head over to your terminal and, like before, commit all of your changes so we can check out what the recipes will do. I already did that.

Installing the Debugging Tools

Then run:

composer require debug

Yup! That's another Flex alias. And... it installs a pack. This installs four different packages that add a variety of debugging goodness to our project. Spin over and open composer.json.

80 lines | composer.json
{
// ... lines 2 - 5
"require": {
// ... lines 7 - 14
"symfony/monolog-bundle": "^3.0",
// ... lines 16 - 20
},
// ... lines 22 - 78
}

Ok, the pack added one new line under the require key for monolog-bundle. Monolog is a logging library.

Then all the way at the bottom, it added three packages to a require-dev section.

80 lines | composer.json
{
// ... lines 2 - 73
"require-dev": {
"symfony/debug-bundle": "7.0.*",
"symfony/stopwatch": "7.0.*",
"symfony/web-profiler-bundle": "7.0.*"
}
}

These are known as dev dependencies... which means they won't be downloaded when you deploy to production. But otherwise, they work the same as packages under the require key. All three of these help power something called the profiler. We'll see that in just a minute.

Before we do, go back to your terminal and run

git status

so we can see what the recipes did. Ok: it updated the normal files, enabled a few new bundles and gave us three new configuration files for those bundles.

What's the end result of all this new stuff? Well, first, we now have a logging library. So, like magic, logs will start popping into a var/log/ directory.

Hello Web Debug Toolbar & Profiler

But the mind-blowing moment happens when we refresh the page. Woh! A beautiful new black bar at the bottom called the web debug toolbar.

This is bursting with info. Over here, we can see the route and controller for this page. That it makes it easy to go to any page on your site - maybe one you didn't even build - and quickly find the code behind it. We can also see how long this page took the load, how much memory it used, and even the twig template that was rendered and how long that took.

But the real magic of the web debug toolbar happens when you click any of these links: you hop into the profiler. This has ten times more info: details about the request and response, logs that occurred while loading that page, routing details, and even stats about which Twig templates were rendered. Apparently six templates were rendering: our main one, the base layout and a few others that power the web debug toolbar, which, by the way, won't be rendered or shown when we deploy to production. But we'll talk about that in the next tutorial.

Then there's probably my favorite section: Performance. This slices our entire page load time into different pieces. I love this. As you learn more about Symfony, you'll get more familiar with what these different pieces are. This section is useful for knowing which part of your code might be slowing down the page... but it's also a fantastic way to dive deeper into Symfony and understand all its moving pieces.

We're going to use the profiler throughout this series, but let's turn to another debugging tool: one that's been installed in our app this whole time!

Hello bin/console!

Head over to the command line and run:

php bin/console

Or, on most machines, you can just say ./bin/console. This is Symfony's console, and it's packed with commands that can do all sorts of stuff! We'll learn about them along the way. You can also add your own commands, which we'll do at the end of the tutorial.

Notice that a bunch of these start with debug - like debug:router. Try that:

php bin/console debug:router

Cool! This shows us every route in our app: the homepage route at the bottom and a bunch of routes added by Symfony in the dev environment that power the web debug toolbar and profiler.

Another command is debug:twig:

php bin/console debug:twig

This tells us every Twig function, filter or other thing that exists in our app. This is like the Twig docs... except it also includes extra functions and filters that are added to Twig by bundles that we have installed. Pretty cool.

These debug commands are super useful, and we'll keep trying more of them along the way.

Next, let's create our first API endpoint and learn about Symfony's powerful serializer component.