30 Symfony Best Practices

30 Symfony Best Practices

SymfonyDay 09, Cologne, Germany September 4th, 2009

Nicolas Perriault

30 Symfony Best Practices

Best Practices?
A Best practice is a technique, method, process, activity, incentive or reward that is believed to be more effective at delivering a particular outcome than any other technique, method, process, etc.The idea is that with proper processes, checks, and testing, a desired outcome can be delivered with fewer problems and unforeseen complications. Best practices can also be dened as the most efcient (least amount of effort) and effective (best results) way of accomplishing a task, based on repeatable procedures that have proven themselves over time for large numbers of people. -- Wikipedia, august 2009

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30 Symfony Best Practices

Best Practices?
Making. Stuff. Efcient.

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30 Symfony Best Practices

Best Practices?

Moreover, best practices in software development and symfony are all about:

improving communication between developers through standardization enhancing security, maintainability, portability and interoperability by increasing code quality
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30 Symfony Best Practices

Disclaimer

These best practices are not sorted by importance, nor criticality All best practices listed here are debatable, at least because theyre based on my own experience There are always exceptions Some best practices are not symfony-specic ; Zake Igniter developers, you can take some notes too.
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30 Symfony Best Practices

Lets begin...

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30 Symfony Best Practices

#0

Always write symfony starting with a small cap.

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30 Symfony Best Practices

#0

Always write symfony starting with a small cap. Or maybe not (mostly depends on the result of rand(0,
1))

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30 Symfony Best Practices

#1

Manage the View within the View

View is intended to be handled in templates Try to avoid the use of the view.yml le Try to avoid handling the view from the controller (eeeek) or the model (youre red) Slots can help (a lot)
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#1
For example, handling <title> tag and assets:

Note: here the value of $defaultTitle could (should) be handled in an app.yml conguration le

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30 Symfony Best Practices

#1
Remember this: if youre a graphic designer/

integrator, you dont want to deal with YAML or complex PHP code to manage the presentation

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#2
Always enable output escaping and CSRF
protection

starting with symfony 1.3, theyre enabled

by default

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GOOD

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#3
Always call a redirect after posting data for security purpose for ergonomy to avoid duplicates in database dont forget to add a ash message to the
end user after every transaction made
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BAD

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GOOD

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#4

No Propel Criteria or Doctrine_Query instances, SQL queries and any ORM/RDBMS specic calls should ever be found neither in the templates nor in the actions. The more you couple your model to your controllers and views, the more itll be hard to change your persistence backend or strategy.
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BAD

Doctrine_Collection
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BETTER

Array
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GOOD

Array (ideally)
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#5
Symfony core les should never be
modied to add or change the features they provide, but replaced through the autoloading mechanism, or way better: extended. catching native symfony events can help a lot achieving this goal.
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Tweaking the factories.yml le and

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30 Symfony Best Practices

BAD
Unused

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GOOD

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#6
The templates must contain PHP

alternative templating syntax, for readability and ease of use.

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BAD

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GOOD

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#7
Verify cache settings, especially that the If you use cache, create a staging
cache is actually enabled in prod environment. Dont laugh, it happened quite a lot. environment to test the caching strategy if it doesn't exist.

Better: avoid using cache. No kidding.

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GOOD

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#8
Use routes instead of raw module/action
couple in url_for(), link_to() and redirect() calls.

Also, default routes should be deactivated

by default (at least in apps which dont run admin-generator 1.0 modules)

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#9
All code comments, phpdoc, INSTALL,
CHANGELOG and README les, variables,

functions, classes and methods names and more generally the developer documentation, should be written in English.

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BAD

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#10
Catch and log exception messages, display

human readable error messages to the end user

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BAD

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GOOD

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#11
Only deploy production front controllers in
production

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BAD

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BAD

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#12
Ideally: A typical controller method should never
exceed ~30 lines.

A typical controller class should never

have more than ~15 action methods.
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x
BAD

~2000 lines on this actions class (the slidescreen size was to short to list them all). Unmaintenable.

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#13
Always apply consistent coding
standards.

Always apply Symfonys coding standards.

http://trac.symfony-project.org/wiki/HowToContributeToSymfony#CodingStandards

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BAD

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#14
Session persistence logic should

reside in sfUser derived class methods, and only them.

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BAD

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#15
Never serialize objects in the session

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Note: of course, a setRecentlySeenProducts() method could have been implemented in the myUser class.

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#16
Always create customized 404 error and
500 error pages

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BAD

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#17

There should never be any direct use of sfContext inside the Model layer (eg. sfContext::getInstance())

Because the sfContext instance you get can differ a lot regarding the used env (cli, test, dev, prod...) It would make your code quite untestable

Yes, its hard.

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BAD

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#18
Avoid creating a big generic utility class
with many static methods

It's like reinventing procedural Write specialized classes

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programming or using functions

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#19
Use sfLogger for debugging instead of
echoing variable or debug messages

FirePHP(1) or FireSymfony(2) custom loggers can be more than helpful to debug your app (webservices for example)
(1) http://rephp.org/ (2) http://resymfony.org/

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factories.yml

The FireSymfony Firebug extension for Firefox in action

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#20

If source code is managed through a SCM tool, versioned les should NEVER contain passwords, local paths, etc.

Files containing them should be added to the ignore directive Typical example: the databases.yml le Distribute platform-dependent conguration les
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BAD

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#21
Write unit and functional tests: test your (please Unit test symfony business logicits dont or Doctrine again,
already done)

Functionally test the user interface

when its important (eg.
404/403/401 HTTP codes, security and user authentication, transactions and forms, etc.)
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#21
Hint: you can write your own functional browser/ tester to avoid duplicate test code

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#22

Never use absolute paths in code, or at least put them in YAML conguration les. Make your symfony project portable: use dirname(__FILE__) to point at the symfony libs in the project conguration class. You can put symfony lib in a lib/vendor dir.

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#23
Data objects should always be represented
by a slug in urls, not a primary key

For security: numeric PKs are easily

guessable, whereas slugs are not
/article/symfony-rulez.html

For URL usability and SEO:

than /article/123.html
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is sexier

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#24
Every application or project specic You can share project-wide (crossconguration variable should be stored in its app.yml le applications) settings by putting an app.yml le within the root config/ folder of the project
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BAD

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Default value
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#25
Avoid versioning any generated Base* class
le, especially if you want to write reusable plugins or redistribute your work. behaviors to your model classes.

Maybe people will want to extend or add

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#26
Use symfony tasks system for CLI batch
scripts

Tasks have access to all the symfony

facilities

Tasks are designed for the CLI Text output Pretty printing
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#26

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#27
Alter request and response
programmatically by using lters. and response.filter_content events too. whereas events are more clean and powerful. Matter of taste.

You can use the request.filter_parameters Filters are easy to setup and to debug,
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#28

Always write a README, an INSTALL and a CHANGELOG le at the root of the project (or the plugin). If open sourced, a LICENSE le is appreciated too. And please dont release plugins under the terms of the GPL license. Symfony Plugin != Operating System

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#29
Share features and modules across
applications by writing plugins

If its really cool, release it publicly

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#30
Study other frameworks code! They might have good, even better ideas
to solve the problem you have

Even frameworks written in other

languages than PHP (Django, Rails, Spring...)

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Questions?
Nicolas Perriault
nperriault@gmail.com +33 660 920 867
prendreuncafe.com | symfonians.net | symfony-project.org

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