Contributing

This guide is meant to help you start contributing to the Symfony CLI by providing some key hints and explaining specifics related to this project.

Language choice

First-time contributors could be surprised by the fact that this project is written in Go whereas it is highly related to the Symfony Framework which is written in PHP.

Go has been picked because it is well suited for system development and has close-to-zero runtime dependencies which make releasing quite easy. This is ideal for a tool that is used on a wide range of platforms and potentially on systems where the requirements to run Symfony are not met.

Another reason is to make Symfony CLI independent of the PHP version because one goal of the CLI is to make it possible to use many different versions of PHP.

Finally, Go is also usually quite easy to apprehend for PHP developers having some similarities in their approach.

Setup Go

Contributing to the CLI, implies that one must first setup Go locally on their machine. Instructions are available on the official Go website. Just pick the latest version available: Go will automatically download the version currently in use in the project and dependencies as required.

Local setup

First fork this repository and clone it to some location of your liking. Next, try to build and run the project:

$ go build .

If any error happen you must fix them before going on. If no error happen, this should produce a binary in the project directory. By default, this binary is named symfony-cli and suffixed with .exe on Windows.

You should be able to run it right away:

$ ./symfony-cli version

The binary is self-contained: you can copy it as-is to another system and/or execute it without any installation process.

Tip: This binary can be executed from anywhere by using it's absolute path. This is handy during development when you need to run it in a project directory and you don't want to overwrite your system-wide Symfony CLI.

Finally, before and after changing code you should ensure tests are passing:

$ go test ./...

Coding style

The CLI follows the Go standard code formatting. To fix the code formatting one can use the following command:

$ go fmt ./...

One can also uses the go vet command in order to fix common mistakes:

$ go vet ./...

Cross compilation

By definition, the CLI has to support multiple platforms which means that at some point you might need to compile the code for another platform than the one your are using to develop.

This can be done using Go cross-platform compiling capabilities. For example the following command will compile the CLI for Windows:

$ GOOS=windows go build .

GOOS and GOARCH environment variables are used to target another OS or CPU architecture, respectively.

During development, please take into consideration (in particular in the process and file management sections) that we currently support the following platforms matrix:

• Linux / 386
• Linux / amd64
• Linux / arm
• Linux / arm64
• Darwin / amd64
• Darwin / arm64
• Windows / 386
• Windows / amd64

Code generation

Part of the code is generated automatically. One should not need to regenerate the code themselves because a GitHub Action is in-charge of it. In the eventuality one would need to debug it, code generation can be run as follows:

$ go generate ./...

If you add a new code generation command, please also update the GitHub workflow in .github/workflows/go_generate_update.yml.

Additional repositories

Contrary to the Symfony PHP Framework which is a mono-repository, the CLI tool is developed in multiple repositories. symfony-cli/symfony-cli is the main repository where lies most of the logic and is the only repository producing a binary.

Every other repository is mostly independent and it is highly unlikely that you would need to have a look at them. However, in the eventuality where you would have to, here is the description of each repository scope:

• symfony-cli/phpstore is an independent library in charge of the PHP installations discovery and the logic to match a specific version to a given version constraint.
• symfony-cli/console is an independent library created to ease the process of Go command-line application. This library has been created with the goal of mimicking the look and feel of the Symfony Console for the end-user.
• symfony-cli/terminal is a wrapper around the Input and Output in a command line context. It provides helpers around styling (output formatters and styling - à la Symfony) and interactivity (spinners and questions helpers)
• symfony-cli/dumper is a library similar to Symfony's VarDumper component providing a Dump function useful to introspect variables content and particularly useful in the strictly typed context of Go.

If you ever have to work on those package, you can setup your local working copy of the CLI to work with a local copy of one of those package by using go work:

$ go work init
$ go work use .
$ go work use /path/to/package/fork
# repeat last command for each package you want to work with