Symfony News

New in Symfony 6.2: PSR-4 Route Loader

Contributed by
Alexander M. Turek
in #47916 and #47943.

In your Symfony applications you probably have a configuration similar to the following:

# config/routes.yaml
controllers:
    resource: ../src/Controller/
    type: attribute

This tells Symfony to look for all PHP files defined in that directory and load the routes defined as PHP attributes in the classes of those files. Internally, this uses AnnotationDirectoryLoader and AnnotationFileLoader to find the route annotations.

More specifically, AnnotationFileLoader finds all PHP files recursively and AnnotationFileLoader inspects their contents, using PHP token_get_all() function, to get the full class name for the first class found in the file. The entire process is cached, so it only impacts performance the first time.

However, since all modern PHP projects use PSR-4 class autoloading, all this is unnecessary. PSR-4 defines the corresponding file path for a given fully qualified class name (and vice versa), so there's no need to guess which class defines each file.

In Symfony 6.2, we're introducing a new PSR-4 routing loader, which is similar to the annotation routing loader, but finds routes faster because it assumes that your project files follow PSR-4. See Psr4DirectoryLoader code.

The only needed change in your applications is to define the PSR-4 namespace used by your controller classes:

# config/routes.yaml
 controllers:
-    resource: ../src/Controller/
+    resource:
+        path: ../src/Controller/
+        namespace: App\Controller
     type: attribute

In addition to the YAML configuration shown above, the namespace option is also supported in XML and PHP configs.