single: Service Container single: DependencyInjection; Container
A modern PHP application is full of objects. One object may facilitate the delivery of email messages while another may allow you to persist information into a database. In your application, you may create an object that manages your product inventory, or another object that processes data from a third-party API. The point is that a modern application does many things and is organized into many objects that handle each task.
This chapter is about a special PHP object in Symfony that helps you instantiate, organize and retrieve the many objects of your application. This object, called a service container, will allow you to standardize and centralize the way objects are constructed in your application. The container makes your life easier, is super fast, and emphasizes an architecture that promotes reusable and decoupled code. Since all core Symfony classes use the container, you'll learn how to extend, configure and use any object in Symfony. In large part, the service container is the biggest contributor to the speed and extensibility of Symfony.
Finally, configuring and using the service container is easy. By the end of this chapter, you'll be comfortable creating your own objects via the container and customizing objects from any third-party bundle. You'll begin writing code that is more reusable, testable and decoupled, simply because the service container makes writing good code so easy.
Tip
If you want to know a lot more after reading this chapter, check out the DependencyInjection component documentation </components/dependency_injection>.
single: Service Container; What is a service?
Put simply, a service is any PHP object that performs some sort of "global" task. It's a purposefully-generic name used in computer science to describe an object that's created for a specific purpose (e.g. delivering emails). Each service is used throughout your application whenever you need the specific functionality it provides. You don't have to do anything special to make a service: simply write a PHP class with some code that accomplishes a specific task. Congratulations, you've just created a service!
Note
As a rule, a PHP object is a service if it is used globally in your application. A single Mailer service is used globally to send email messages whereas the many Message objects that it delivers are not services. Similarly, a Product object is not a service, but an object that persists Product objects to a database is a service.
So what's the big deal then? The advantage of thinking about "services" is that you begin to think about separating each piece of functionality in your application into a series of services. Since each service does just one job, you can easily access each service and use its functionality wherever you need it. Each service can also be more easily tested and configured since it's separated from the other functionality in your application. This idea is called service-oriented architecture and is not unique to Symfony or even PHP. Structuring your application around a set of independent service classes is a well-known and trusted object-oriented best-practice. These skills are key to being a good developer in almost any language.
single: Service Container; What is a service container?
A service container (or dependency injection container) is simply a PHP object that manages the instantiation of services (i.e. objects).
For example, suppose you have a simple PHP class that delivers email messages. Without a service container, you must manually create the object whenever you need it:
use AppBundle\Mailer;
$mailer = new Mailer('sendmail');
$mailer->send('ryan@example.com', ...);This is easy enough. The imaginary Mailer class allows you to configure the method used to deliver the email messages (e.g. sendmail, smtp, etc). But what if you wanted to use the mailer service somewhere else? You certainly don't want to repeat the mailer configuration every time you need to use the Mailer object. What if you needed to change the transport from sendmail to smtp everywhere in the application? You'd need to hunt down every place you create a Mailer service and change it.
single: Service Container; Configuring services
A better answer is to let the service container create the Mailer object for you. In order for this to work, you must teach the container how to create the Mailer service. This is done via configuration, which can be specified in YAML, XML or PHP:
Note
When Symfony initializes, it builds the service container using the application configuration (app/config/config.yml by default). The exact file that's loaded is dictated by the AppKernel::registerContainerConfiguration() method, which loads an environment-specific configuration file (e.g. config_dev.yml for the dev environment or config_prod.yml for prod).
An instance of the AppBundle\Mailer class is now available via the service container. The container is available in any traditional Symfony controller where you can access the services of the container via the get() shortcut method:
class HelloController extends Controller
{
// ...
public function sendEmailAction()
{
// ...
$mailer = $this->get('app.mailer');
$mailer->send('ryan@foobar.net', ...);
}
}When you ask for the app.mailer service from the container, the container constructs the object and returns it. This is another major advantage of using the service container. Namely, a service is never constructed until it's needed. If you define a service and never use it on a request, the service is never created. This saves memory and increases the speed of your application. This also means that there's very little or no performance hit for defining lots of services. Services that are never used are never constructed.
As a bonus, the Mailer service is only created once and the same instance is returned each time you ask for the service. This is almost always the behavior you'll need (it's more flexible and powerful), but you'll learn later how you can configure a service that has multiple instances in the /service_container/shared article.
Note
In this example, the controller extends Symfony's base Controller, which gives you access to the service container itself. You can then use the get method to locate and retrieve the app.mailer service from the service container.
The creation of new services (i.e. objects) via the container is pretty straightforward. Parameters make defining services more organized and flexible:
# app/config/services.yml
parameters:
app.mailer.transport: sendmail
services:
app.mailer:
class: AppBundle\Mailer
arguments: ['%app.mailer.transport%']<!-- app/config/services.xml -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<container xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services
http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services/services-1.0.xsd">
<parameters>
<parameter key="app.mailer.transport">sendmail</parameter>
</parameters>
<services>
<service id="app.mailer" class="AppBundle\Mailer">
<argument>%app.mailer.transport%</argument>
</service>
</services>
</container>// app/config/services.php
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Definition;
$container->setParameter('app.mailer.transport', 'sendmail');
$container->setDefinition('app.mailer', new Definition(
'AppBundle\Mailer',
array('%app.mailer.transport%')
));The end result is exactly the same as before - the difference is only in how you defined the service. By enclosing the app.mailer.transport string with percent (%) signs, the container knows to look for a parameter with that name. When the container is built, it looks up the value of each parameter and uses it in the service definition.
Note
If you want to use a string that starts with an @ sign as a parameter value (e.g. a very safe mailer password) in a YAML file, you need to escape it by adding another @ sign (this only applies to the YAML format):
# app/config/parameters.yml
parameters:
# This will be parsed as string '@securepass'
mailer_password: '@@securepass'Note
The percent sign inside a parameter or argument, as part of the string, must be escaped with another percent sign:
<argument type="string">http://symfony.com/?foo=%%s&bar=%%d</argument>The purpose of parameters is to feed information into services. Of course there was nothing wrong with defining the service without using any parameters. Parameters, however, have several advantages:
- separation and organization of all service "options" under a single
parameterskey; - parameter values can be used in multiple service definitions;
- when creating a service in a bundle (this follows shortly), using parameters allows the service to be easily customized in your application.
The choice of using or not using parameters is up to you. High-quality third-party bundles will always use parameters as they make the service stored in the container more configurable. For the services in your application, however, you may not need the flexibility of parameters.
Parameters can also contain array values. See component-di-parameters-array.
single: Service Container; Referencing services
So far, the original app.mailer service is simple: it takes just one argument in its constructor, which is easily configurable. As you'll see, the real power of the container is realized when you need to create a service that depends on one or more other services in the container.
As an example, suppose you have a new service, NewsletterManager, that helps to manage the preparation and delivery of an email message to a collection of addresses. Of course the app.mailer service is already really good at delivering email messages, so you'll use it inside NewsletterManager to handle the actual delivery of the messages. This pretend class might look something like this:
// src/AppBundle/Newsletter/NewsletterManager.php
namespace AppBundle\Newsletter;
use AppBundle\Mailer;
class NewsletterManager
{
protected $mailer;
public function __construct(Mailer $mailer)
{
$this->mailer = $mailer;
}
// ...
}Without using the service container, you can create a new NewsletterManager fairly easily from inside a controller:
use AppBundle\Newsletter\NewsletterManager;
// ...
public function sendNewsletterAction()
{
$mailer = $this->get('app.mailer');
$newsletter = new NewsletterManager($mailer);
// ...
}This approach is fine, but what if you decide later that the NewsletterManager class needs a second or third constructor argument? What if you decide to refactor your code and rename the class? In both cases, you'd need to find every place where the NewsletterManager is instantiated and modify it. Of course, the service container gives you a much more appealing option:
# app/config/services.yml
services:
app.mailer:
# ...
app.newsletter_manager:
class: AppBundle\Newsletter\NewsletterManager
arguments: ['@app.mailer']<!-- app/config/services.xml -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<container xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services
http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services/services-1.0.xsd">
<services>
<service id="app.mailer">
<!-- ... -->
</service>
<service id="app.newsletter_manager" class="AppBundle\Newsletter\NewsletterManager">
<argument type="service" id="app.mailer"/>
</service>
</services>
</container>// app/config/services.php
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Definition;
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Reference;
$container->setDefinition('app.mailer', ...);
$container->setDefinition('app.newsletter_manager', new Definition(
'AppBundle\Newsletter\NewsletterManager',
array(new Reference('app.mailer'))
));In YAML, the special @app.mailer syntax tells the container to look for a service named app.mailer and to pass that object into the constructor of NewsletterManager. In this case, however, the specified service app.mailer must exist. If it does not, an exception will be thrown. You can mark your dependencies as optional - this will be discussed in the next section.
Using references is a very powerful tool that allows you to create independent service classes with well-defined dependencies. In this example, the app.newsletter_manager service needs the app.mailer service in order to function. When you define this dependency in the service container, the container takes care of all the work of instantiating the classes.
Injecting dependencies into the constructor in this manner is an excellent way of ensuring that the dependency is available to use. If you have optional dependencies for a class, then "setter injection" may be a better option. This means injecting the dependency using a method call rather than through the constructor. The class would look like this:
namespace AppBundle\Newsletter;
use AppBundle\Mailer;
class NewsletterManager
{
protected $mailer;
public function setMailer(Mailer $mailer)
{
$this->mailer = $mailer;
}
// ...
}Injecting the dependency by the setter method just needs a change of syntax:
# app/config/services.yml
services:
app.mailer:
# ...
app.newsletter_manager:
class: AppBundle\Newsletter\NewsletterManager
calls:
- [setMailer, ['@app.mailer']]<!-- app/config/services.xml -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<container xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services
http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services/services-1.0.xsd">
<services>
<service id="app.mailer">
<!-- ... -->
</service>
<service id="app.newsletter_manager" class="AppBundle\Newsletter\NewsletterManager">
<call method="setMailer">
<argument type="service" id="app.mailer" />
</call>
</service>
</services>
</container>// app/config/services.php
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Definition;
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Reference;
$container->setDefinition('app.mailer', ...);
$container->setDefinition('app.newsletter_manager', new Definition(
'AppBundle\Newsletter\NewsletterManager'
))->addMethodCall('setMailer', array(
new Reference('app.mailer'),
));Note
The approaches presented in this section are called "constructor injection" and "setter injection". The Symfony service container also supports "property injection".
/service_container/*