How do I generate a friendly URL in Symfony PHP?

Question

I always tend to forget these built-in Symfony functions for making links.

Answer 1

If your goal is to have user-friendly URLs throughout your application, use the following approach:

1) Create a routing rule for your module/action in the application's routing.yml file. The following example is a routing rule for an action that shows the most recent questions in an application, defaulting to page 1 (using a pager):

recent_questions:
   url:    questions/recent/:page
   param:  { module: questions, action: recent, page: 1 }

2) Once the routing rule is set, use the url_for() helper in your template to format outgoing URLs.

<a href="<?php echo url_for('questions/recent?page=1') ?>">Recent Questions</a>

In this example, the following URL will be constructed: http://myapp/questions/recent/1.html.

3) Incoming URLs (requests) will be analyzed by the routing system, and if a pattern match is found in the routing rule configuration, the named wildcards (ie. the :/page portion of the URL) will become request parameters.

You can also use the link_to() helper to output a URL without using the HTML <a> tag.