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08.

Controlling the prod Environment

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Let's see what our app looks like if we change to the prod environment. To do that, open the .env file and change APP_ENV to prod:

22 lines | .env
// ... lines 1 - 15
###> symfony/framework-bundle ###
APP_ENV=prod
// ... lines 18 - 22

Clearing Cache in the prod Environment

Cool! Now, find your browser, refresh and... it works! Well, actually, we got lucky. Behind the scenes, when we load a page, Symfony caches configuration, templates and other things for performance. In the dev environment, if we update a config file, Symfony automatically rebuilds the cache. So it's not something we even need to think about.

But in the prod environment - which is primed for performance - Symfony does not automatically rebuild your cache files. For example, if we added a new route to our app and then went to that URL in the prod environment, it would give us a page not found error! Why? Because our app would be using outdated routing cache.

That's why, whenever you change to the prod environment, you need to find your terminal and run a special command:

php bin/console cache:clear

This clears the cache so that, on our next reload, new cache will be built. The cache is stored in a var/cache/prod directory. Oh, and notice that bin/console is smart enough to know that we're in the prod environment.

In practice, I rarely switch to the prod environment on my local computer. The most common time I run cache:clear is when I'm deploying.

Now our app definitely works. And notice: no web debug toolbar!

Let's see Symfony's automatic caching system in action. Open up templates/question/show.html.twig and... let's make some small change - like Question::

59 lines | templates/question/show.html.twig
// ... lines 1 - 4
{% block body %}
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-12">
<h2 class="my-4">Question:</h2>
// ... lines 10 - 26
</div>
</div>
// ... lines 29 - 56
</div>
{% endblock %}

This time, when we refresh, the change is not there. That's because Symfony caches Twig templates. Now find your terminal, run:

php bin/console cache:clear

And come back to refresh. There's the change!

Different Cache Adapter in prod

Now that we understand environments, I have a challenge for us! At the top of the page, we're still dumping the cache service inside our controller. The class is ApcuAdapter because that's what we configured inside of config/packages/cache.yaml:

20 lines | config/packages/cache.yaml
framework:
cache:
// ... lines 3 - 13
# APCu (not recommended with heavy random-write workloads as memory fragmentation can cause perf issues)
app: cache.adapter.apcu
// ... lines 16 - 20

APCu is great. But maybe for simplicity, because it requires you to have a PHP extension installed, we want to use the filesystem adapter in the dev environment and APCu only for prod. How could we do that?

Let's think about it: we know how to override configuration in a specific environment... so we could override just this one config key in the dev environment.

To do that, in the dev/ directory, create a new file. It technically doesn't matter what it's called, but because we value our sanity, call it cache.yaml. Inside, say framework:, cache:, app: and the name of the original default value for this: cache.adapter.filesystem:

4 lines | config/packages/dev/cache.yaml
framework:
cache:
app: cache.adapter.filesystem

That's... all we need! Let's see if it works! Because we're still in the prod environment, find your terminal and clear the cache:

php bin/console cache:clear

When it finishes, go refresh the page. Good: in prod it's still using ApcuAdapter. Now go find the .env file at the root of the project... change APP_ENV back to dev:

22 lines | .env
// ... lines 1 - 15
###> symfony/framework-bundle ###
APP_ENV=dev
// ... lines 18 - 20
###< symfony/framework-bundle ###

And refresh the page.

Because the web debug toolbar is back, our dump is hiding inside its target icon. Let's see... yes! It's FilesystemAdapter!

Ok team: we've mastered environments and configuring services that are coming from bundles. So let's take things up to the next level: let's create our own service objects! That's next.