Symfony interview questions and Answers

Questions

20

Last updated

Feb 6, 2023

Symfony is one of the most widely used PHP frameworks with a set of reusable components and options. Symfony aims to expedite the creation and maintenance of web applications and replace repetitive coding tasks. Though Symfony is known for its low-performance overhead, it gives developers control over the overall configuration. Though most of the Symfony Interview Questions vary from organization to organization, we would still like to put together these related questions and answers that you can expect during the interview.

Development History: Symfony was published as free software in October 2005, and released under the MIT license.

Key points about Symfony:
  • Sponsored by SensioLabs.
  • Inspired by the Spring Framework.
  • Symfony ranks 3rd in popularity after Laravel and CodeIgniter.
  • It is aimed at building robust, enterprise-level applications.
  • Makes use of existing PHP open source projects.
  • They are bundled with additional components to help developers test and debug projects.

Most Frequently Asked Symfony interview questions

Here in this article, we will be listing frequently asked Symfony interview questions and Answers with the belief that they will be helpful for you to gain higher marks. Also, to let you know that this article has been written under the guidance of industry professionals and covered all the current competencies.

Q1. What is Symfony?
Answer

Symfony is a leading, reliable and one of the most used PHP framework combined with a set of highly featureful and reusable PHP components to create websites, dynamic web applications, web services and microservices. It is an open source framework and supports the MVC design pattern.

Q2. Explain the bundles in Symfony.
Answer

Bundles in Symfony are similar to packages or plugins in other CMS or frameworks. In Symfony, bundles provide the developers with the flexibility to use pre-built features consisted of third-party bundles or to create and distribute their own bundles.

Symfony has two types of bundles:

  • Application specific bundles
  • Reusable bundles
Q3. What is a Symfony controller?
Answer

Symfony controller is a PHP function that obtains information from the HTTP request to construct and return an HTTP response. The response can vary and could be an XML document, an HTML page, a redirect, a 404 error, a serialized JSON array, or any other request.

Q4. Explain an Environment in Symfony.
Answer

A group of configurations used to run an application is basically described as an Environment in Symfony.

This framework has two default environments:

  • Prod: Optimized for executing an application on production
  • Dev: Used when an application is developed locally.
Q5. Mention few web servers supported by Symfony.
Answer

Symfony framework supports various user popular web servers. For example, few of the best web servers compatible with Symfony are LAMP, WAMP, XAMP, MAMP, Microsoft IIS, Nginx, and PHP’s built-in web server.

Q6. Explain the tasks performed by a Symfony controller.
Answer

A Symfony controller can do virtually anything inside this framework. From redirecting and forwarding to accessing core services to rendering templates; a controller in Symfony can be used for various basic tasks.

Q7. What are the innovations used in Symfony2 compared to Symfony1?
Answer

Few crucial innovations that implemented with Symfony2 are as following:

  • Use of the Dependency Injection Pattern
  • Complete Bundle setup
  • Packed as Distributions
  • Ease of debugging an application
  • Improved security additions
Q8. In which technology Symfony routing configuration files are written?
Answer

The Symfony routing configuration files are written with YAML, XML and PHP technology. The default routing configuration file in Symfony is: app/config/routing.yml

Q9. Explain Serializer in Symfony.
Answer

Serializer is a component present is Symfony that offers developers an option to convert a PHP object into a specific format such as JSON, Binary, XML, etc.

Q10. What is Twing in Symfony?
Answer

Twing is a templating language present in Symfony. Developers use it to perform sandboxing, automatic HTML escaping, whitespace control, and various other purposes.

Q11. Mention the cache adapters present in Symfony.
Answer

Symfony has five cache adapters available inside it. The available cache adapters are as following:

  • File system cache adapter
  • Array cache adapter
  • APCu cache adapter
  • PHP files cache adapter
  • Redis cache adapter
Q12. Explain the case of user access denies in Symfony.
Answer

When an unauthorized individual tries to access the web application, Symfony shows a 403 HTTP status and throws an error page denying the user access request.

Q13. To install and run the latest version of Symfony, list the server requirements.
Answer

Symfony 4.0 is the latest version of the series and requires a server requirement of:

  • PHP 5.5.9 or above
  • JSON enabled
  • Composer
  • type enabled
  • set of date. timezone
Q14. What are the rules to create methods within the controller in Symfony?
Answer

There are four general rules need to be followed to create methods within the controller in Symfony, which are as following:

  • Only action methods should be public
  • Action” suffix must be included in action methods
  • Controller methods should be short
  • A valid response object should be fixed for action methods
Q15. Is it possible to create a Symfony application using composer? Then, how?
Answer

Yes, it’s possible to create a Symfony application using composer. The developer needs to run the following command in the console to install Symfony using composer:

composer create-project symphony/framework-standard-edition my_project_name

Q16. Explain the session set and get methods in Symfony2.
Answer

Symfony2 uses a SessionInterface object set and get method to get and set sessions.

Following syntax can be referred as an example:

public function sessionAction(SessionInterface $session)

{

// store an attribute for reuse during a later user request

$session->set('user_id', 5);

// get the attribute set by another controller in another request

 $user_id = $session->get('user_id');

}

Q17. How to get the request / query parameters in Symfony?
Answer

In Symfony, developers can get the request parameter by using the following syntax:

  • $this->container->get('request');
  • $name=$request->query->get('name');
Q18. Mention the form helper functions in Symfony.
Answer

Symfony has following form helper functions for developers:

  • Checkbox
  • Form_start
  • Form_end
  • Textarea
  • Input_password_tag
Q19. What are the benefits of using Symfony?
Answer

Using Symfony has a number of its unique benefits, such as:

  • Fast development
  • Unlimited user flexibility
  • MVC pattern
  • The stable and sustainable framework
  • Better user control & ease of use
  • Expandable
Q20. Is it possible to create a request object in Symfony, then how?
Answer

Yes, it’s possible to create a request object in Symfony by developers. Use the

createFromGlobals() methods to simply create the request object.