MakerBundle & Autoconfigure

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Congrats on making it so far! Seriously: your work on this tutorial is going to make everything else you do make a lot more sense. Now, it's time to celebrate!

One of the best parts of Symfony is that it has a killer code generator. It's called "MakerBundle"... because shouting "make me a controller!" is more fun than saying "generate me a controller".

Hello MakerBundle

Let's get it installed. Find your terminal and run:

composer require "maker:^1.30" --dev

We're adding --dev because we won't need the MakerBundle in production, but that's a minor detail.

As I've mentioned so many times - sorry - bundles give you services. In this case, MakerBundle doesn't give you services that you will use directly, like in your controller. Nope, it gives you services that power a huge list of new console commands.

When the install finishes, run:

php bin/console make:

Woh! Our app suddenly has a bunch of commands that start with make:, like make:command, make:controller, make:crud, make:entity, which will be a database entity and more.

Let's try one of these! Let's make our own custom console command!

Making a Custom Console Command

Because, in Symfony, you can hook into anything. The bin/console executable

php bin/console

is no exception: we can add our own command here. I do this all the time for CRON jobs or data importing. To get started, run:

php bin/console make:command

Ok: it asks us for a command name. I like to prefix mine with app: how about app:random-spell. Our new command will output a random magical spell - very useful!

And... we're done! You can see that this created a new src/Command/RandomSpellCommand.php file. Let's go check it out!

            
            43 lines
            
            src/Command/RandomSpellCommand.php
        
                                                    ... lines 1 - 11
                            
            class RandomSpellCommand extends Command
        
            {
        
                protected static $defaultName = 'app:random-spell';
        
                protected function configure()
        
                {
        
                    $this
        
                        ->setDescription('Add a short description for your command')
        
                        ->addArgument('arg1', InputArgument::OPTIONAL, 'Argument description')
        
                        ->addOption('option1', null, InputOption::VALUE_NONE, 'Option description')
        
                    ;
        
                }
        
                protected function execute(InputInterface $input, OutputInterface $output): int
        
                {
        
                    $io = new SymfonyStyle($input, $output);
        
                    $arg1 = $input->getArgument('arg1');
        
                    if ($arg1) {
        
                        $io->note(sprintf('You passed an argument: %s', $arg1));
        
                    }
        
                    if ($input->getOption('option1')) {
        
                        // ...
        
                    }
        
                    $io->success('You have a new command! Now make it your own! Pass --help to see your options.');
        
                    return 0;
        
                }
        
            }

Cool! We can see the name on top, it has a description, some options... and, at the bottom, it ultimately prints a message. We'll start customizing this in a minute.

But before we do that... guess what? The new command already works! Run:

php bin/console app:random-spell

It's alive! This message is coming from the bottom of the new class.

Service Auto Configuration

But wait: how did Symfony instantly see our new command class and start using it? Is it because... it lives in a Command/ directory and Symfony scans for classes that live there? Nope! We could rename this to directory to DefinitelyNoCommandsInHere/ and it would still see the command.

The way this works is way cooler. Open up config/services.yaml and look at the _defaults section. We talked about what autowire: true means, but I did not explain the purpose of autoconfigure: true:

            
            33 lines
            
            config/services.yaml
        
                                                    ... lines 1 - 8
                            
            services:
        
                # default configuration for services in *this* file
        
                _defaults:
        
                    autowire: true      # Automatically injects dependencies in your services.
        
                    autoconfigure: true # Automatically registers your services as commands, event subscribers, etc.
        
                                                    ... lines 14 - 33

Because this is below _defaults, autoconfiguration is active on all of our services, including our new command.

When autoconfiguration is enabled for a service, it basically tells Symfony:

Yo! Please look at the base class or interface of this service and if it looks like it should be a command, or an event listener or something else that hooks into Symfony, please automatically integrate it into that system. Thanks!

In other words, Symfony sees our service, notices that it extends Command:

            
            43 lines
            
            src/Command/RandomSpellCommand.php
        
                                                    ... lines 1 - 4
                            
            use Symfony\Component\Console\Command\Command;
        
                                                    ... lines 6 - 11
                            
            class RandomSpellCommand extends Command
        
            {
        
                                                    ... lines 14 - 41
                            
            }

And thinks:

I bet this is meant to be a console command. I'll just... hook it into that system automatically.

I love this because it means there is zero configuration needed to get things working. And you'll see this in a bunch of places in Symfony: you create a class, make it implement an interface and... it'll just start working. We'll see another example in a few minutes with a Twig extension.

Ok! Now that our command is working, let's customize it! Playing with console commands is one of my favorite things to do in Symfony. Let's go!

What PHP libraries does this tutorial use?

// composer.json
{
    "require": {
        "php": "^7.3.0 || ^8.0.0",
        "ext-ctype": "*",
        "ext-iconv": "*",
        "composer/package-versions-deprecated": "^1.11", // 1.11.99
        "knplabs/knp-markdown-bundle": "^1.8", // 1.9.0
        "sensio/framework-extra-bundle": "^6.0", // v6.2.1
        "sentry/sentry-symfony": "^4.0", // 4.0.3
        "symfony/asset": "5.0.*", // v5.0.11
        "symfony/console": "5.0.*", // v5.0.11
        "symfony/debug-bundle": "5.0.*", // v5.0.11
        "symfony/dotenv": "5.0.*", // v5.0.11
        "symfony/flex": "^1.3.1", // v1.17.5
        "symfony/framework-bundle": "5.0.*", // v5.0.11
        "symfony/monolog-bundle": "^3.0", // v3.6.0
        "symfony/profiler-pack": "*", // v1.0.5
        "symfony/routing": "5.1.*", // v5.1.11
        "symfony/twig-pack": "^1.0", // v1.0.1
        "symfony/var-dumper": "5.0.*", // v5.0.11
        "symfony/webpack-encore-bundle": "^1.7", // v1.8.0
        "symfony/yaml": "5.0.*" // v5.0.11
    },
    "require-dev": {
        "symfony/maker-bundle": "^1.15", // v1.23.0
        "symfony/profiler-pack": "^1.0" // v1.0.5
    }
}

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Symfony 5 >

COURSE

Symfony 5 Fundamentals: Services, Config & Environments

MakerBundle & Autoconfigure

Keep on Learning!

Hello MakerBundle

Making a Custom Console Command

Service Auto Configuration

Leave a comment!

What PHP libraries does this tutorial use?

	... lines 1 - 11
	class RandomSpellCommand extends Command
	{
	protected static $defaultName = 'app:random-spell';

	protected function configure()
	{
	$this
	->setDescription('Add a short description for your command')
	->addArgument('arg1', InputArgument::OPTIONAL, 'Argument description')
	->addOption('option1', null, InputOption::VALUE_NONE, 'Option description')
	;
	}

	protected function execute(InputInterface $input, OutputInterface $output): int
	{
	$io = new SymfonyStyle($input, $output);
	$arg1 = $input->getArgument('arg1');

	if ($arg1) {
	$io->note(sprintf('You passed an argument: %s', $arg1));
	}

	if ($input->getOption('option1')) {
	// ...
	}

	$io->success('You have a new command! Now make it your own! Pass --help to see your options.');

	return 0;
	}
	}

	... lines 1 - 8
	services:
	# default configuration for services in this file
	_defaults:
	autowire: true # Automatically injects dependencies in your services.
	autoconfigure: true # Automatically registers your services as commands, event subscribers, etc.
	... lines 14 - 33

	... lines 1 - 4
	use Symfony\Component\Console\Command\Command;
	... lines 6 - 11
	class RandomSpellCommand extends Command
	{
	... lines 14 - 41
	}