README.md

Symfony Contracts

A set of abstractions extracted out of the Symfony components.

Can be used to build on semantics that the Symfony components proved useful - and that already have battle tested implementations.

Design Principles

• contracts are split by domain, each into their own sub-namespaces;
• contracts are small and consistent sets of PHP interfaces, traits, normative docblocks and reference test suites when applicable, etc.;
• all contracts must have a proven implementation to enter this repository;
• they must be backward compatible with existing Symfony components.

FAQ

How to use this package?

The abstractions in this package are useful to achieve loose coupling and interoperability. By using the provided interfaces as type hints, you are able to reuse any implementations that match their contracts. It could be a Symfony component, or another one provided by the PHP community at large.

Depending on their semantics, some interfaces can be combined with autowiring to seamlessly inject a service in your classes.

Others might be useful as labeling interfaces, to hint about a specific behavior that could be enabled when using autoconfiguration or manual service tagging (or any other means provided by your framework.)

How is this different from PHP-FIG's PSRs?

When applicable, the provided contracts are built on top of PHP-FIG's PSR. We encourage relying on them and won't duplicate the effort. Still, the FIG has different goals and different processes. Here, we don't need to seek universal standards. Instead, we're providing abstractions that are compatible with the implementations provided by Symfony. This should actually also contribute positively to the PHP-FIG (from which Symfony is a member), by hinting the group at some abstractions the PHP world might like to take inspiration from.

Why isn't this package split into several packages?

Putting all interfaces in one package eases discoverability and dependency management. Instead of dealing with a myriad of small packages and the corresponding matrix of versions, you just need to deal with one package and one version. Also when using IDE autocompletion or just reading the source code, it makes it easier to figure out which contracts are provided.

There are two downsides to this approach: you may have unused files in your vendor/ directory, and in the future, it will be impossible to use two different sub-namespaces in different major versions of the package. For the "unused files" downside, it has no practical consequences: their file sizes are very small, and there is no performance overhead at all since they are never loaded. For major versions, this package follows the Symfony BC + deprecation policies, with an additional restriction to never remove deprecated interfaces.

Resources

• Documentation
• Contributing
• Report issues and send Pull Requests in the main Symfony repository