How we Upgraded to Symfony 2.7 (+ deprecation notices)

Symfony 2.7 - the next LTS release - came out on Saturday, with bells and whistles like 100+ new features/enhancements and a surprise new bridge component to PSR-7.

So, we decided to upgrade immediately and report back. Let's go!

Upgrading composer.json

Since Symfony protects backwards-compatibility, upgrading is mostly easy, but we did hit a few minor things. Btw, there's a new upgrade section on the docs - tell your friends!

Start by updating your composer.json changes to allow for 2.7.*:

{
    "require": {
        "php": ">=5.3.3",
        "symfony/symfony" : "2.7.*",
        "...": "..."
    }
}

Now update this with composer. The command may surprise you:

composer update symfony/symfony sensio/distribution-bundle --with-dependencies

This will upgrade your project, but there are two important things happening:

1. You need to upgrade sensio/distribution-bundle

The version doesn't matter, just any new tag, 2.3.14 or higher. Why? Symfony 2.7 comes with deprecation warnings, which are awesome for knowing what deprecated features you're using. But, it also means that you need to silence E_USER_DEPRECATED warnings. The latest version of sensio/distribution-bundle builds an app/bootstrap.php.cache file that silences E_USER_DEPRECATED warnings for you. Don't worry: you'll still see the deprecated warnings in your web debug toolbar (see the image on this post).

So, if you see a friend who's getting a lot messages that look like this:

Deprecated: The Definition::setFactoryMethod method is deprecated since
version 2.6 and will be removed in 3.0.

Tell them to upgrade their sensio/distribution-bundle. And of course, to eventually fix these deprecated calls.

2. You Need --with-dependencies

This flag tells composer to update symfony/symfony and all libraries that it depends on. You may not need this, but without it, we got a dependency error involving twig/twig. The version of Twig in our project was not compatible with Symfony and needed to be upgraded. To allow for this, you have two options: use --with-dependencies, or explicitly upgrade the library in question (e.g. twig/twig):

composer update symfony/symfony twig/twig sensio/distribution-bundle

So What Broke?

Yay, you upgraded! Now, what broke? In our case, not much: in fact, only things in third-party bundles.

Upgrading FOSUserBundle

A new enhancement in Symfony 2.7 caused an accidental bug in FOSUserBundle. This was fixed two months ago, but you'll need to upgrade FOSUserBundle to get it.

If you're using a 1.3 release, just run the update command below (a tag was just released with the fix). If you're using the master (or 2.0) branch, that's not stable yet, and has no tag. Make sure your composer.json file has something like "friendsofsymfony/user-bundle": "~2.0@dev". Then let composer work its magic:

composer update friendsofsymfony/user-bundle

But check the UPGRADE log on the bundle to see what might have changed.

Fixing Behat 2.5

We're using Behat 2.5, which suffered from a minor BC break in Symfony 2.7. If you get this error:

Runtime Notice: Declaration of InputDefinition::getSynopsis()
should be compatible with InputDefinition::getSynopsis($short = false)  

then welcome to the club! Fortunately, this issue has been fixed (thanks to Stof for the fast release), so you just need to upgrade:

composer update behat/behat

If you're using the symfony2 driver, Behat may also explode on the new deprecated notices. To fix this, add the following at the top of your FeatureContext class::

define('BEHAT_ERROR_REPORTING', E_ALL & ~E_USER_DEPRECATED);

Back to the tests! And welcome to Symfony 2.7.

If you hit other issues, comment below and maybe we can help others.

Cheers!