How to simulate a REPL for Symfony applications

You can simulate a REPL like Laravel’s php artisan or Rails’ rails console by creating a controller only for debugging purposes.

For example, create a src/Controller/Debug/DebugController.php file:

<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

namespace App\Controller\Debug;

use App\Entity\Company;
use Doctrine\ORM\EntityManagerInterface;
use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\AbstractController;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Attribute\Route;

class DebugController extends AbstractController
{
    public function __construct(
        private EntityManagerInterface $entityManager,
    ) {
    }

    // http://localhost:8080/debug
    #[Route('/debug', condition: '"%kernel.environment%" === "dev"')]
    public function debug(): Response
    {
        $company = $this->entityManager->getRepository(Company::class)->find(665);

        dd($company);
    }
}

Don’t track your debug controller in Git by adding it to the .git/info/exclude file (see this post for more info).

Open the .git/info/exclude file:

vim .git/info/exclude

Add your debug controller’s file pattern:

/src/Controller/Debug

Add a browser bookmark or set up a system-wide hotkey to quickly launch your debug route (http://localhost:8080/debug in the example above).