SymfonyLive Berlin 2025

What's new in Symfony 7.3 (Nicolas Grekas)

As of June 2025, Symfony 7.3 is the latest stable version of your preferred web-tech spine. In this talk, I'd like to take some time to review the main new features contributed by the community during the last 12 months of this release. New components, new best practices enabling more declarative code, etc. Don't miss this talk to stay on the living edge and celebrate together this nice milestone.

Asynchronous PHP (Florian Engelhardt)

In today's fast-paced digital world, no one likes to wait. Yet, PHP scripts often find themselves waiting on databases, email servers, HTTP servers, file systems, and even RAM. The result? Your customers are left waiting too. Discover how to break free from the waiting game by embracing asynchronous PHP architecture. In this talk, we'll dive into the power of RabbitMQ and ReactPHP to significantly reduce waiting times and optimise performance. Get ready for live coding, real-world examples, and expert insights that will empower you to create efficient, high-performing PHP applications that keep your customers coming back for more.

Agentic Applications with Symfony (Christopher Hertel)

A chat interface is by far not all what you could build with Symfony and Large Language Models. And agentic applications are the next level of integrating AI - not only in your code, but also in your business. Let's have a look together on some basic concepts and hands-on examples of letting AI take over more responsibilities in a well-defined and automated manner.

Running Symfony in a Multi-Process Container (Anne-Julia Seitz)

The deployment scenario for PHP looks a little different than for other languages like Go or Ruby that have embedded webservers. The classic stack of NGINX/Apache + php-fpm doesn't perfectly fit in the container world. Some solution providers, like DigitalOcean or certain Azure products, only allow for single containers to be deployed. In this talk, we'll explore ways other people have solved this, like FrankenPHP and others. For production deployments, there is k8s, swarm, compose, and running everything in one multiprocess container. These single containers could be orchestrated with systemd, supervisord, or Runit. We'll talk about the benefits and downsides of these solutions, compare them with the choice we made for our last project, s6-overlay, show off the s6-cli project I developed for this purpose and talk about recipes for running database migrations, cronjobs and a few more.

SEAL: Dive into the sea of search engines (Alexander Schranz)

The world of search engines is big – a lot of different terms exist, what makes it really hard to understand what is going on. Beside the widely used Elasticsearch, nowadays there are lots of alternatives like Meilisearch, Algolia, Redisearch, Loupe and others. Here I will introduce SEAL the Search Engine Abstraction Layer. What flysystem is for file storages and doctrine DBAL for databases, SEAL is for search engines. SEAL will give you a generic interface to communicate with different search engines. In this talk I will give an introduction to the search topic and what I found out in my research about search engines, how SEAL the Search Engine Abstraction Layer for PHP was born and which search engines are supported. Can we demystify the technical search engine jargon into an understandable friendly configuration for everybody? Finally, we will take a closer look at the Symfony integration via the great extendable Symfony dependency injection container.

API Platform without Doctrine (Jérôme Tamarelle)

API Platform is the reference tool for creating sophisticated web APIs, with seamless integration to Doctrine and various data sources. But what if you want to access other types of databases, or optimize queries for specific use cases? Is it possible to do without Doctrine?

PHP Extensions: Still Alive and Full of Hidden Powers (Andreas Braun)

With PHP gaining more and more features, are PHP extensions still necessary? Beyond just accessing system libraries, extensions unlock capabilities that pure PHP code still can’t replicate. Imagine defining custom behaviors for operators, enabling intuitive syntax through operator overloading, or tailoring equality checks with flexible object comparisons—these are things only possible in an extension. Extensions even allow objects to be cast to scalar types like int or string, adding versatility to how they’re used. In this talk, we’ll dive into some of the coolest things extensions make possible, pushing PHP beyond its usual boundaries. And yes, we’ll also explore when extensions can be taken a little too far, showing that just because something can be done doesn’t always mean it should be!

Building really fast applications (Tobias Nyholm)

Let us talk about performance. What can we do to make an application run faster? What should we be considering when starting a new application? There are some quick fixes that I will quickly cover. But to get down to really fast response times requires hard work. I will give my best ideas and tricks for fast apps. I will show how we can build applications that responds in less that 15ms and then work towards even faster than that. No, this is not a Varnish talk.

Where have the women of tech history gone? (Laura Durieux)

Ada Lovelace, Hedy Lamarr, the 'ENIAC Girls,' Grace Hopper, Joan Clarke... Stemming from the role of a calculator, the profession of a developer was initially considered a women's job, while hardware design was seen as a man's job. However, who are these women who have shaped the world of tech? Why don't we hear more about them? With Laura Durieux, you'll attempt to set the record straight bit by bit and provide role models in tech that you've always needed.

Distributed Transactions in Symfony (Denis Brumann)

In microservice or event-driven architectures you might find yourself having to solve issues which are simple when working with monolithic applications. One of these challenges is distributed transactions, i.e. performing an action across multiple services can be safely reversed when something fails along the call chain. The Saga pattern is an established approach to make this happen. Let's have a look at what it is, how we can implement it in a modern Symfony application and when we might want to avoid it.

So you think you know PHPUnit (Sebastian Bergmann)

PHPUnit has been around for over two decades and is used by nearly every PHP developer in the world. While most of us know the basics, there are depths and hidden valleys of PHPUnit that even the most experienced of us may have never even heard of. Join Sebastian Bergmann, the creator and maintainer of PHPUnit, to dig into the hidden depths of lesser known features to get more out of the amazing tool you use every day.

Demystify the magic of the Container (Oliver Kossin)

Symfony offer many great features that make our lives much easier. Thanks to dependency injection and service containers, for example, we never have to worry about whether a class is available somewhere. But what has been given to us for years is actually not even a function of PHP. But what exactly is a "container" and how exactly does it enable us to magically always have everything "available"? In this workshop, we will not only take a detailed look at what "dependency injection" actually is. But also what exactly a container is and to build it together step by step in order to be able to understand it even better in our frameworks in the future.

CI in PHP Projects: Automate Everything with Your Personal Army of Robots (Alexander M. Turek)

Imagine a personal army of robots tirelessly working behind the scenes to ensure your PHP projects are bug-free, secure, and production-ready. That’s the power of continuous integration (CI). In this talk, we’ll learn how to build automation-driven pipelines that transform your workflow, so you can focus on writing great code. We’ll cover platform-agnostic strategies for setting up CI pipelines using tools like GitHub Actions and GitLab CI/CD. Learn how to automate essential tasks, including linting, dependency validation, and running tests with code coverage, all within consistent and reproducible Docker-based environments. Whether you’re new to CI or looking to enhance your existing setup, this session will equip you with practical techniques to save time, catch issues early, and maintain high-quality code. By the end, you’ll have the skills to unleash your own “robotic workforce” and let automation do the heavy lifting, leaving you to focus on building innovative applications. Let’s put your PHP projects on autopilot—because robots never sleep.

Need a MACH-ready Search Engine? (Stephan Hochdörfer)

In this talk, let me introduce you to Gally, an (e-commerce) search engine that powers your application's search experience. I'll show you how Gally works, guide you on how to configure Gally for your specific use case, and demonstrate how to integrate Gally into your application easily thanks to its API-first design principles.

Composer Guide to Supply Chain Security (Nils Adermann)

Supply chain security is ever more important to manage when working on software projects. This talk will illuminate attack surfaces of modern PHP applications beyond the security of the application code itself. This guide will help you improve supply chain security in your composer projects in concrete practical steps and you will learn about Composer's architecture and features that impact supply chain security.