The Service Container & Autowiring

We found out that KnpMarkdownBundle allows us to control some of the features of the markdown parser by using this knp_markdown.parser.service key:

We used their documentation to learn that there were a few valid values for this service key.

But what is this? What does markdown.parser.light mean? Is it just a string that someone invented when they were designing the config for this bundle?

Not exactly: in this case, markdown.parser.light happens to be the id of a service in the container.

Hello Service Container

Let's... back up. We know that there are many useful objects - called services - floating around in Symfony. What I haven't told you yet is that, behind the scenes, Symfony puts all of these services inside something called the "service container". You can think of the service container as basically an associative array of services, where each object has a unique id.

How can we see a list of all of the services in the container and their IDs? Just run debug:autowiring, right? Actually, not quite. Find your terminal and run a new command called:

php bin/console debug:container

And wow! This is the full list of all the services inside the service container! On the left is the service's id or "key" - like filesystem and on the right is the type of object you would get if you asked for this service. The filesystem service is an instance of Symfony\Component\Filesystem\Filesystem.

You can see that this is a really long list. But the truth is that you will probably only ever use a very small number of these. Most of these are low-level service objects that help other more important services do their work.

Not all Services are Autowireable

Because of this, many of these services cannot be accessed via autowiring. What I mean is, for most of these services, there is no type-hint that you could use in a controller to fetch that service. So how would you access a service if it can't be autowired? Don't worry about that yet, we'll talk about how later.

The point is: not all services can be autowired but the most useful ones can. To get that, shorter, list of autowireable services, we run:

php bin/console debug:autowiring

This is not the full list of services, but it's usually all you'll need to use.

How Autowiring Works

While we're looking at this list, I want to talk about how autowiring works. We know that we can use the type-hint on the left to get the service with the id on the right. For example, we can use this AdapterInterface type-hint to fetch some service called cache.app.

Cool. But... how does that work? How does Symfony know that the AdapterInterface should give us that exact service? When Symfony sees an argument type-hinted with Symfony\Component\Cache\Adapter\AdapterInterface, does... it loop over every service in the container and look for one that implements that interface?

Fortunately, no. The way autowiring works is so much simpler. When Symfony sees an argument type-hinted with Symfony\Component\Cache\Adapter\AdapterInterface, to figure out which service to pass, it does one simple thing: it looks for a service in the container with this exact id. Yes, there is a service in the container whose id is literally this long interface name.

Let me show you. Once again, run:

php bin/console debug:container

Most of the service ids have snake-case names: lower case letters and periods. But if you scroll up to the top, there are also some services whose ids are class or interface names. And... yea! Here's a service whose id is: Symfony\Component\Cache\Adapter\AdapterInterface! On the right, it says that it's an alias to cache.app.

Ok, so there are two important things. First, when you type-hint an argument with Symfony\Component\Cache\Adapter\AdapterInterface, Symfony figures out which service to pass to you by looking for a service in the container with that exact id. If it finds it, it uses it. If it doesn't, you get an error. Second, some services - like this one - aren't real services: they're aliases to another service. If you ask for the AdapterInterface service, Symfony will actually give you the cache.app service. It's kind of like a symlink.

This is primarily how the autowiring system works. Bundles add services to the container and typically they use this snake-case naming scheme, which means the services can't be autowired. Then, to add autowiring support for the most important services, they register an alias from the class or interface to that service.

If this went a little over your head... don't sweat it. The most important thing is this: autowiring isn't magic. When you add a type-hint to autowire a service, Symfony simply looks for a service in the container with that id. If it finds one, life is good. If not... error!

Next, let's use our bundle-config skills to figure out how to control where Symfony stores the cache... which we know means: let's control how the cache service behaves.