Symfony creating routes

last modified July 5, 2020

Symfony creating routes tutorial shows how to create routes in Symfony with annotations, XML, YAML and PHP.

Symfony

Symfony is a set of reusable PHP components and a PHP framework for web projects. Symfony was published as free software in 2005. The original author of Symfony is Fabien Potencier. Symfony was heavily inspired by the Spring Framework.

Routes

A route is a map from a URL path to a controller. For instance, the /about URL is mapped to the MyController's about() method.

Symfony allows to create routes with annotations, XML, YAML, and PHP.

Symfony creating routes example

In the following example, we create routes in different ways.

$ composer create-project symfony/skeleton createroutes

With composer, we create a new Symfony skeleton project.

$ cd createroutes

We go to the project directory.

$ composer require maker
$ composer require annotations

We install two modules: annotations and maker.

$ composer require server --dev

We install the development web server.

$ php bin/console make:controller MyController

A MyController is created.

<?php

namespace App\Controller;

use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\AbstractController;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Annotation\Route;

class MyController extends AbstractController
{
    /**
     * @Route("/about", name="about")
     */
    public function about()
    {
        return new Response("This is About page", Response::HTTP_OK,
            ['content-type' => 'text/plain']);
    }

    public function index()
    {
        return new Response("This is Index page", Response::HTTP_OK,
            ['content-type' => 'text/plain']);
    }

    public function news()
    {
        return new Response("This is News page", Response::HTTP_OK,
            ['content-type' => 'text/plain']);
    }    

    public function contacts()
    {
        return new Response("This is Contacts page", Response::HTTP_OK,
            ['content-type' => 'text/plain']);
    }     
}

The MyController has four routes created with annotation, XML, YAML, and PHP. Each of the routes returns simple text.

/**
* @Route("/about", name="about")
*/
public function about()
{
    return new Response("This is About page", Response::HTTP_OK,
        ['content-type' => 'text/plain']);
}

The about route is mapped with the @Route annotation.

index:
    path: /
    controller: App\Controller\MyController::index

The index route is mapped in YAML configuration file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<routes xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/routing"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://symfony.com/schema/routing
        http://symfony.com/schema/routing/routing-1.0.xsd">

    <route id="contacts" controller="App\Controller\MyController::contacts" path="/contacts" >
    </route>
</routes>

The contacts route is mapped in XML configuration file.

<?php

use App\Controller\MyController;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Route;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\RouteCollection;

$routes = new RouteCollection();
$routes->add('news', new Route('/news', [
    '_controller' => [MyController::class, 'news']
]));

return $routes;

The news route is created with PHP code.

$ php bin/console server:run

We start the development server.

$ curl localhost:8000/about
This is About page
$ curl localhost:8000/news
This is News page
$ curl localhost:8000/
This is Index page
$ curl localhost:8000/contacts
This is Contacts page

We generate requests with curl.

In this tutorial we have created routes in Symfony using annotation, XML, YAML configuration and PHP code.

List all Symfony tutorials.