Symfony News

New in Symfony 4.3: Native PHP Serialization for Messenger

Contributed by
Ryan Weaver
in #29958.

In Symfony 4.2, the Messenger component uses the Serializer component to serialize messages to JSON and then unserialize them. This creates some issues:

• The default serializer requires you to have getter & setter methods (or public properties) for them to be serialized. This makes it easy for data to disappear.
• Moreover, the forced getters/setters (and no required constructor arguments) force you to design your message classes around this.

The original reason why we did this was so that we could export "generic JSON", in case we wanted other workers to consume the messages, no matter if they used Symfony, PHP or any other programming language and technology. However, this is not the common use case and it was complicating things unnecessarily.

In Symfony 4.3, we fixed this problem by switching the serialization to a new class called PhpSerializer which uses PHP's native serialize() and unserialize() to serialize messages to a transport.

If you want to keep using the previous JSON serializer (or your own custom serializer service) configure it as follows:

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# config/packages/messenger.yaml
framework:
    messenger:
        serializer:
            # ID of the service to use to serialize messages
            id: 'messenger.transport.symfony_serializer'