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01.

Bundles give you Services

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Yo guys! Welcome to episode 2 of our Symfony 4 series! This is a very important episode because we're going to take just a little bit of time to really understand how our app works. I'm talking about how configuration works, the significance of different files and a whole lot more.

And yea, there's a reason we're doing this work now and not in a distant, future episode: by understanding a few FUNdamentals, everything else in Symfony will make a lot more sense. So let's dig in and get to work!

Code Download

As always, if you code along with me, we instantly become best friends. Pow! Download the course code from this page and unzip it. Inside, you'll find a start/ directory with the same code you see here.

Open the README.md file for a whimsical space poem... and instructions on how to get the app setup. The last step will be to find a terminal, move into the project and run:

./bin/console server:run

to start the built-in PHP web server. Ok! Let's load up our app! Find your browser and go to http://localhost:8000. Welcome back to... "The Space Bar": the latest and greatest intergalactic news and sharing site for astronauts and non-human-eating aliens across the universe. Or, it will be when we're finished.

Services: Objects that do Work

Let's start off stage 2 of our journey with a pop quiz: in episode 1, what did I say was the most important part of Symfony? If you answered Fabien... you're technically right, but the real answer is: services. Remember: a service is an object that does work: there's a logger service and a Twig service.

To get a list of the services that we can access, you can go to your terminal, open a new tab, and run:

./bin/console debug:autowiring

For example, to get the logger service, we can use the LoggerInterface type-hint:

52 lines | src/Controller/ArticleController.php
// ... lines 1 - 4
use Psr\Log\LoggerInterface;
// ... lines 6 - 11
class ArticleController extends AbstractController
{
// ... lines 14 - 39
/**
* @Route("/news/{slug}/heart", name="article_toggle_heart", methods={"POST"})
*/
public function toggleArticleHeart($slug, LoggerInterface $logger)
{
// ... lines 45 - 46
$logger->info('Article is being hearted!');
// ... lines 48 - 49
}
}

You can see this in our controller: yep, as soon as we add an argument with the LoggerInterface type-hint, Symfony knows to pass us the logger service.

Where do Services Come From? Bundles

But... where do these service objects come from? I mean, somebody must be creating them in the background for us, right? Totally! It's not very important yet, but every service is stored inside another object called the container. And each service has an internal name, just like routes.

And what exactly puts these services into the container? The answer: bundles. Bundles are Symfony's plugin system. Look inside config/ and open a bundles.php file there:

12 lines | config/bundles.php
// ... lines 1 - 2
return [
Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\FrameworkBundle::class => ['all' => true],
Symfony\Bundle\WebServerBundle\WebServerBundle::class => ['dev' => true],
Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\SensioFrameworkExtraBundle::class => ['all' => true],
Symfony\Bundle\TwigBundle\TwigBundle::class => ['all' => true],
Symfony\Bundle\WebProfilerBundle\WebProfilerBundle::class => ['dev' => true, 'test' => true],
Symfony\Bundle\MonologBundle\MonologBundle::class => ['all' => true],
Symfony\Bundle\DebugBundle\DebugBundle::class => ['dev' => true, 'test' => true],
];

Yep, our app has seven bundles so far - basically seven plugins. We installed 6 of these in episode 1: the recipe system automatically updates this file when you require a bundle. Sweet!

So let's put this all together: Symfony is really nothing more than a collection of services. And bundles are what actually prepare those service objects and put them into the container. For example, MonologBundle is responsible for giving us the logger service.

Bundles can also do other things - like add routes. But they really have one main job: bundles give you services. If you add a bundle, you get more services. And remember, services are tools.

So let's install a new bundle and play with some new tools!