Symfony

Symfony

Symfony Welcome Page
Original author(s)	Fabien Potencier
Developer(s)	Symfony community
Initial release	22 October 2005; 19 years ago (2005-10-22)
Stable release	7.2.0[1] / 2024-11-29[±]
Repository	Symfony Repository
Written in	PHP
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Web application framework
License	MIT License
Website	symfony.com

Symfony is a free and open-source PHP web application framework and a set of reusable PHP component libraries. It was published as free software on October 18, 2005, and released under the MIT License.

Symfony aims to speed up the creation and maintenance of web applications and to replace repetitive coding tasks. It's also aimed at building robust applications in an enterprise context, and aims to give developers full control over the configuration: from the directory structure to third-party libraries, almost everything can be customized.^[2] To match enterprise development guidelines, Symfony is bundled with additional tools to help developers test, debug and document projects.^[3]

Symfony has a low performance overhead used with a bytecode cache.

Symfony was heavily inspired by the Spring Framework.^[4][5]

It makes heavy use of existing PHP open-source projects as part of the framework, including:

• PDO database abstraction layer (1.1, with Doctrine and Propel 1.3)
• PHPUnit, a unit testing framework
• Twig, a templating engine
• Swift Mailer, an e-mail library

Symfony also makes use of its own components, which are freely available on the Symfony Components site for various other projects:

• Symfony YAML, a YAML parser based upon Spyc
• Symfony Event Dispatcher
• Symfony Dependency Injector, a dependency injector
• Symfony Templating, a templating engine

Symfony is sponsored by SensioLabs, a French software developer and professional services provider.^[6] The first name was Sensio Framework,^[7] and all classes were therefore prefixed with sf. Later on when it was decided to launch it as open-source framework, the brainstorming resulted in the name symfony (being renamed to Symfony from version 2 and on), which matches the existing theme and class name prefixes.^[8]

• Symfony is used by the open-source Q&A service Askeet and many more applications, including Delicious website.^[9]
• At one time it was used for 20 million users of Yahoo! Bookmarks.^[10]
• As of February 2009, Dailymotion.com has ported part of its code to use Symfony, and is continuing the transition.^[11]
• Symfony is used by OpenSky, a social shopping platform, and the Symfony framework is also used by the massively multiplayer online browser game eRepublik, and by the content management framework eZ Publish in version 5.^[12]
• Drupal 8, phpBB and a number of other large applications have incorporated components of Symfony.^[13][14]
• Symfony is also used by Meetic, one of the largest online dating platforms in the world, on most of its websites for implementing its business logic in the backend.^[15]
• Symfony components are also used in other web application frameworks including Laravel, which is another full-stack framework, and Silex, which is a microframework.^[16]
• Vogue Paris's website is also built on the Symfony framework^[17]

Symfony's own website has a comprehensive list of projects using Symfony and a showcase of websites built with Symfony.^[18]

Symfony manages its releases through a time-based model; a new Symfony release comes out every six months: one in May and one in November. This release process has been adopted as of Symfony 2.2, and all the "rules" explained in this document must be strictly followed as of Symfony 2.4.

The standard version of Symfony is maintained for eight months, whereas long-term support (LTS) versions are supported for three years. A new LTS release is published biennially.^[19]

The latest stable release is version 7.2 and current LTS release is version 6.4.^[20]

• Comparison of server-side web frameworks
• Lime, a Test framework for Symfony 1
• Zend Framework

• Potencier, Fabien. (2022). Symfony 6: The Fast Track. Leanpub.
• Potencier, Fabien and Zaninotto, François. (2007). The Definitive Guide to symfony. Apress. ISBN 1-59059-786-9.
• Potencier, Fabien. (2009). Practical symfony (2009). Sensio Labs Books. Doctrine edition, ISBN 978-2-918390-06-0, Propel edition, 978-2918390077, and Spanish edition available on lulu.com.
• Fabien Potencier, Hugo Hamon: Symfony, Mieux développer en PHP avec symfony 1.2 et Doctrine, Eyrolles 2009, ISBN 978-2-212-12494-1, French
• Tim Bowler, Wojciech Bancer (2009). Symfony 1.3 Web Application Development, Packt. ISBN 978-1-84719-456-5.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Symfony.

• Official website
• SymfonyCasts