lazy_services.rst

.. index::
   single: Dependency Injection; Lazy Services

Lazy Services

.. versionadded:: 2.3
   Lazy services were added in Symfony 2.3.

Why Lazy Services?

In some cases, you may want to inject a service that is a bit heavy to instantiate, but is not always used inside your object. For example, imagine you have a NewsletterManager and you inject a mailer service into it. Only a few methods on your NewsletterManager actually use the mailer, but even when you don't need it, a mailer service is always instantiated in order to construct your NewsletterManager.

Configuring lazy services is one answer to this. With a lazy service, a "proxy" of the mailer service is actually injected. It looks and acts just like the mailer, except that the mailer isn't actually instantiated until you interact with the proxy in some way.

Installation

In order to use the lazy service instantiation, you will first need to install the ProxyManager bridge:

$ php composer.phar require symfony/proxy-manager-bridge:2.3.*

Note

If you're using the full-stack framework, this package is not included and needs to be added to composer.json and installed (which is what the above command does).

Configuration

You can mark the service as lazy by manipulating its definition:

.. configuration-block::

    .. code-block:: yaml

        services:
           foo:
             class: Acme\Foo
             lazy: true

    .. code-block:: xml

        <service id="foo" class="Acme\Foo" lazy="true" />

    .. code-block:: php

        $definition = new Definition('Acme\Foo');
        $definition->setLazy(true);
        $container->setDefinition('foo', $definition);

You can then require the service from the container:

$service = $container->get('foo');

At this point the retrieved $service should be a virtual proxy with the same signature of the class representing the service. You can also inject the service just like normal into other services. The object that's actually injected will be the proxy.

Note

If you don't install the ProxyManager bridge, the container will just skip over the lazy flag and simply instantiate the service as it would normally do.

The proxy gets initialized and the actual service is instantiated as soon as you interact in any way with this object.

Additional Resources

You can read more about how proxies are instantiated, generated and initialized in the documentation of ProxyManager.