Upgrading a Third-Party Bundle for a Major Symfony Version

Upgrading a Third-Party Bundle for a Major Symfony Version

Symfony 3 was released on November 2015. Although this version doesn’t contain any new features, it removes all the backward compatibility layers included in the previous 2.8 version. If your bundle uses any deprecated feature and it’s published as a third-party bundle, applications upgrading to Symfony 3 will no longer be able to use it.

Allowing to Install Symfony 3 Components

Most third-party bundles define their Symfony dependencies using the ~2.N or ^2.N constraints in the composer.json file. For example:

  1. {
  2.     "require": {
  3.         "symfony/framework-bundle": "~2.7",
  4.         "symfony/finder": "~2.7",
  5.         "symfony/validator": "~2.7"
  6.     }
  7. }

These constraints prevent the bundle from using Symfony 3 components, so it makes it impossible to install it in a Symfony 3 based application. Thanks to the flexibility of Composer dependencies constraints, you can specify more than one major version by replacing ~2.N by ~2.N|~3.0 (or ^2.N by ^2.N|~3.0).

The above example can be updated to work with Symfony 3 as follows:

  1. {
  2.     "require": {
  3.         "symfony/framework-bundle": "~2.7|~3.0",
  4.         "symfony/finder": "~2.7|~3.0",
  5.         "symfony/validator": "~2.7|~3.0"
  6.     }
  7. }

Tip

Another common version constraint found on third-party bundles is >=2.N. You should avoid using that constraint because it’s too generic (it means that your bundle is compatible with any future Symfony version). Use instead ~2.N|~3.0 or ^2.N|~3.0 to make your bundle future-proof.

Look for Deprecations and Fix Them

Besides allowing users to use your bundle with Symfony 3, your bundle must stop using any feature deprecated by the 2.8 version because they are removed in 3.0 (you’ll get exceptions or PHP errors). The easiest way to detect deprecations is to install the symfony/phpunit-bridge package and then run the test suite.

First, install the component as a dev dependency of your bundle:

  1. $ composer require --dev symfony/phpunit-bridge

Then, run your test suite and look for the deprecation list displayed after the PHPUnit test report:

  1. # this command is available after running "composer require --dev symfony/phpunit-bridge"
  2. $ ./bin/phpunit
  4. # ... PHPUnit output
  6. Remaining deprecation notices (3)
  8. The "pattern" option in file ... is deprecated since version 2.2 and will be
  9. removed in 3.0. Use the "path" option in the route definition instead ...
  11. Twig Function "form_enctype" is deprecated. Use "form_start" instead in ...
  13. The Symfony\Component\Security\Core\SecurityContext class is deprecated since
  14. version 2.6 and will be removed in 3.0. Use ...

Fix the reported deprecations, run the test suite again and repeat the process until no deprecation usage is reported.

Useful Resources

There are several resources that can help you detect, understand and fix the use of deprecated features:

Official Symfony Guide to Upgrade from 2.x to 3.0

The full list of changes required to upgrade to Symfony 3.0 and grouped by component.

SensioLabs DeprecationDetector

It runs a static code analysis against your project’s source code to find usages of deprecated methods, classes and interfaces. It works for any PHP application, but it includes special detectors for Symfony applications, where it can also detect usages of deprecated services.

Symfony Upgrade Fixer

It analyzes Symfony projects to find deprecations. In addition it solves automatically some of them thanks to the growing list of supported “fixers”.

Testing your Bundle in Symfony 3

Now that your bundle has removed all deprecations, it’s time to test it for real in a Symfony 3 application. Assuming that you already have a Symfony 3 application, you can test the updated bundle locally without having to install it through Composer.

If your operating system supports symbolic links, instead point the appropriate vendor directory to your local bundle root directory:

  1. $ ln -s /path/to/your/local/bundle/ vendor/you-vendor-name/your-bundle-name

If your operating system doesn’t support symbolic links, you’ll need to copy your local bundle directory into the appropriate directory inside vendor/.

Update the Travis CI Configuration

In addition to running tools locally, it’s recommended to set-up Travis CI service to run the tests of your bundle using different Symfony configurations. Use the following recommended configuration as the starting point of your own configuration:

  1. language: php
  2. php:
  3.     - 5.3
  4.     - 5.6
  5.     - 7.0
  7. matrix:
  8.     include:
  9.         - php: 5.3.3
  10.           env: COMPOSER_FLAGS='--prefer-lowest --prefer-stable' SYMFONY_DEPRECATIONS_HELPER=max[total]=999999
  11.         - php: 5.6
  12.           env: SYMFONY_VERSION='2.7.*'
  13.         - php: 5.6
  14.           env: SYMFONY_VERSION='2.8.*'
  15.         - php: 5.6
  16.           env: SYMFONY_VERSION='3.0.*'
  17.         - php: 5.6
  18.           env: SYMFONY_VERSION='3.1.*'
  19.         - php: 5.6
  20.           env: DEPENDENCIES='dev' SYMFONY_VERSION='3.2.*@dev'
  22. before_install:
  23.     - composer self-update
  24.     - if [ "$DEPENDENCIES" == "dev" ]; then perl -pi -e 's/^}$/,"minimum-stability":"dev"}/' composer.json; fi;
  25.     - if [ "$SYMFONY_VERSION" != "" ]; then composer --no-update require symfony/symfony:${SYMFONY_VERSION}; fi;
  27. install: composer update $COMPOSER_FLAGS
  29. script: phpunit

Updating your Code to Support Symfony 2.x and 3.x at the Same Time

The real challenge of adding Symfony 3 support for your bundles is when you want to support both Symfony 2.x and 3.x simultaneously using the same code. There are some edge cases where you’ll need to deal with the API differences.

Before diving into the specifics of the most common edge cases, the general recommendation is to not rely on the Symfony Kernel version to decide which code to use:

  1. if (Kernel::VERSION_ID < 20800) {
  2.     // code for Symfony 2.x
  3. } else {
  4.     // code for Symfony 3.x
  5. }

Instead of checking the Symfony Kernel version, check the version of the specific component. For example, the OptionsResolver API changed in its 2.6 version by adding a setDefined() method. The recommended check in this case would be:

  1. use Symfony\Component\OptionsResolver\OptionsResolver;
  3. if (!method_exists(OptionsResolver::class, 'setDefined')) {
  4.     // code for the old OptionsResolver API
  5. } else {
  6.     // code for the new OptionsResolver API
  7. }

Tip

There is one case when you actually can rely on the Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Kernel::VERSION_ID constant: when trying to detect the version of the symfony/http-kernel component, because it is the component where this constant is defined.

This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.