Router Request Context: Fix Paths in the CLI

We sent the email, but it's missing its core content: info about the articles that each author wrote last week. That's no problem for us: we're already passing an articles variable to the template via context(). In the template, replace the <tr> with {% for article in articles %}:

add the <tr>, a <td> and print some data: {{ loop.index }} to number the list, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc, {{ article.title }} and finally, how about: {{ article.comments|length }}.

That's good enough. Double check that by running the command:

php bin/console app:author-weekly-report:send

And... in Mailtrap... we are good.

Why is the Link Broken

Now let's turn to the glaring, horrible bug in our email! Ah! As I mentioned a few minutes ago, if you hover over the link its, gasp, broken! For some reason, it points to localhost not our real domain... which is localhost:8000. Close, but not right.

Hmm. In the template... yea... that looks right: {{ url('app_homepage') }}. Ok, then why - when we click on the link - is it broken?

We know that the url() function tells Symfony to generate an absolute URL. And... it is. I'll run "Inspect Element" on the broken link button. Check out the href: http://localhost not localhost:8000. The same thing would happen if you deployed this to production: it would always say localhost. The URL is absolute... it's just wrong!

Why? Think about it: in the registration email - where this did work - how did Symfony know what our domain was when it generated the link? Did we configure that somewhere? Nope! When you submit the registration form, Symfony simply looks at what the current domain is - localhost:8000 - and uses that for all absolute URLs.

But when you're in a console command, there is no request! Symfony has no idea if the code behind this site is deployed to localhost:8000, example.com, or lolcats.com. So, it just guesses localhost... which is totally wrong... but probably better than guessing lolcats.com?

If you're sending emails from the command line - or rendering templates for any reason that contain paths - you need to help Symfony: you need to tell it what domain to use.

Setting router.request_context

To fix this, start by looking inside our .env file. One of our keys here is called SITE_BASE_URL.

It is the URL to our app. But, but, but! This is not a standard Symfony environment variable and Symfony is not currently using this. Nope, this is an environment variable that we invented in our file uploads tutorial for a totally different purpose. You can see it used in config/services.yaml. It has nothing to do with how Symfony generates URLs.

Anyways, to fix the path problem, you need to set two special parameters. The first is router.request_context.scheme, which you'll set to https or http. The other is router.request_context.host which, for our local development, will be localhost:8000.

# config/packages/routing.yaml
framework:
    router:
        # ...
       default_uri: 'https://example.org/my/path/'

Now obviously, we don't want to hardcode these - at least not the second value: it will be different on production. Instead, we need to set these as new environment variables. And... hey! In .env, the SITE_BASE_URL is almost what we need... we just need it to be kind of split into two pieces. Hmm.

Check this out, create two new environment variables: SITE_BASE_SCHEME set to https and SITE_BASE_HOST set to localhost:8000.

Back in services.yaml, use these values: %env(SITE_BASE_SCHEME)% and %env(SITE_BASE_HOST)%

Cool!

Using Environment Variables... in Environment Variables

The problem is that we now have some duplication. Fortunately, one of the properties of environment variables is that... um... they can contain environment variables! For SITE_BASE_URL, set it to $SITE_BASE_SCHEME - yep, that's legal - :// and then $SITE_BASE_HOST.

I love that trick. Anyways, now that we've set those two parameters, Symfony will use them to generate the URL instead of trying to guess it.

parameters:
    env(SITE_BASE_URL): '%env(SITE_BASE_SCHEME)%://%env(SITE_BASE_HOST)%'

Try the command one last time:

php bin/console app:author-weekly-report:send

And... check it out in Mailtrap! Yes! This time the link points to localhost:8000.

Next! Let's talk about attaching files to an email. Hmm, but to make it more interesting, let's first learn how to generate a styled PDF.