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Set Up Routing in PHP Applications Using the Symfony Routing Component

Today, we’ll go through the Symfony Routing component, which allows you to set up routing in your PHP applications.

What Is the Symfony Routing Component?

The Symfony Routing Component is a very popular routing component which is adapted by several frameworks and provides a lot of flexibility should you wish to set up routes in your PHP application.

If you’ve built a custom PHP application and are looking for a feature-rich routing library, the Symfony Routing Component is more than a worth a look. It also allows you to define routes for your application in the YAML format.

Starting with installation and configuration, we’ll go through real-world examples to demonstrate a variety of options the component has for route configuration. In this article, you’ll learn:

  • installation and configuration
  • how to set up basic routes
  • how to load routes from the YAML file
  • how to use the all-in-one router

Installation and Configuration

In this section, we’re going to install the libraries that are required in order to set up routing in your PHP applications. I assume that you’ve installed Composer in your system as we’ll need it to install the necessary libraries that are available on Packagist.

Once you’ve installed Composer, go ahead and install the core Routing component using the following command.

Although the Routing component itself is sufficient to provide comprehensive routing features in your application, we’ll go ahead and install a few other components as well to make our life easier and enrich the existing core routing functionality.

To start with, we’ll go ahead and install the HttpFoundation component, which provides an object-oriented wrapper for PHP global variables and response-related functions. It makes sure that you don’t need to access global variables like $_GET, $_POST and the like directly.

Next, if you want to define your application routes in the YAML file instead of the PHP code, it’s the YAML component that comes to the rescue as it helps you to convert YAML strings to PHP arrays and vice versa.

Finally, we’ll install the Config component, which provides several utility classes to initialize and deal with configuration values defined in the different types of file like YAML, INI, XML, etc. In our case, we’ll use it to load routes from the YAML file.

So that’s the installation part, but how are you supposed to use it? In fact, it’s just a matter of including the autoload.php file created by Composer in your application, as shown in the following snippet.

Set Up Basic Routes

In the previous section, we went through the installation of the necessary routing components. Now, you’re ready to set up routing in your PHP application right away.

Let’s go ahead and create the basic_routes.php file with the following contents.

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