Book Image

Mastering Symfony

Book Image

Mastering Symfony

Overview of this book

In this book, you will learn some lesser known aspects of development with Symfony, and you will see how to use Symfony as a framework to create reliable and effective applications. You might have developed some impressive PHP libraries in other projects, but what is the point when your library is tied to one particular project? With Symfony, you can turn your code into a service and reuse it in other projects. This book starts with Symfony concepts such as bundles, routing, twig, doctrine, and more, taking you through the request/response life cycle. You will then proceed to set up development, test, and deployment environments in AWS. Then you will create reliable projects using Behat and Mink, and design business logic, cover authentication, and authorization steps in a security checking process. You will be walked through concepts such as DependencyInjection, service containers, and services, and go through steps to create customized commands for Symfony's console. Finally, the book covers performance optimization and the use of Varnish and Memcached in our project, and you are treated with the creation of database agnostic bundles and best practices.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Mastering Symfony
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Index

Generating automated data fixtures


So far, we had only four entities and only one of them changed in structure. However, we spent some effort creating data fixtures for them.

Besides, defining the relationship in each data fixture is a delicate job. Imagine how complex it becomes as the number of entities and their relationship grows in a project. There should be a better way to create data fixtures.

Introducing AliceBundle

AliceBundle wraps around the Alice library that is created to handle data fixtures. With AliceBundle, we can create and modify data fixtures and their relationship in a clean and dynamic way. In other words, we don't need to create bulky PHP classes for data fixtures. A simple yml file will do a way better job with Alice. The good news is that doctrine/data fixture commands are still useful, so we can use the same load command without changing anything.

  1. Start by installing and configuring AliceBundle:

    $ composer require --dev hautelook/alice-bundle doctrine/data-fixtures...