Quick user authentication and CRUD in Symfony 5

We will leverage on Symfony’s generators to quickly code a simple user authentication and CRUD system in less than 15 minutes.

Let’s start by creating a new Symfony project, which we will call sym_auth.

symfony new --full sym_auth

Then we will edit the .env file in the root folder, adding our database credentials.

DATABASE_URL=mysql://sym_auth:sym_auth@127.0.0.1:3306/sym_auth?serverVersion=5.7

I created my database with qdb, but you can also create yours with doctrine as below.

php bin/console doctrine:database:create

Time to create our security class.

php bin/console make:user

And add some more user attributes.

php bin/console make:entity

All done? Then, migration.

php bin/console make:migration

And migrate.

php bin/console doctrine:migrations:migrate

Now we will generate the CRUD based on the User entity.

php bin/console make:crud User

In Form/UserType we will use two new components.

use Symfony\Component\Form\Extension\Core\Type\ChoiceType;
use Symfony\Component\Form\CallbackTransformer;

And

            ->add('Roles', ChoiceType::class, [
                    'required' => true,
                    'multiple' => false,
                    'expanded' => false,
                    'choices'  => [
                      'User' => 'ROLE_USER',
                      'Partner' => 'ROLE_PARTNER',
                      'Admin' => 'ROLE_ADMIN',
                    ],
                ])

        // roles field data transformer 
        $builder->get('Roles')
            ->addModelTransformer(new CallbackTransformer(
                function ($rolesArray) {
                     // transform the array to a string
                     return count($rolesArray)? $rolesArray[0]: null;
                },
                function ($rolesString) {
                     // transform the string back to an array
                     return [$rolesString];
                }
        ));

Now let’s proceed with the authentication system.

php bin/console make:auth

On /src/Security/AppCustomAuthenticator.php, add the redirection route after login.

        // For example : return new RedirectResponse($this->urlGenerator->generate('some_route'));
        // @dth: redirect the user to the user_index route
        return new RedirectResponse($this->urlGenerator->generate('user_index'));

On /src/Controller/UserController.php

Let’s use the interface for encrypting the password.

…
use Symfony\Component\Security\Core\Encoder\UserPasswordEncoderInterface; // @dth: to encode the pass
…

And add a private attribute to hold the encoder object and a constructor to feed it

private $passwordEncoder;
public function __construct(UserPasswordEncoderInterface $passwordEncoder)
{
$this->passwordEncoder = $passwordEncoder;
}

Then, on the /new and /edit route.

            // @todo: refactor
            $plainpwd = $user->getPassword();
            $encoded = $this->passwordEncoder->encodePassword($user, $plainpwd);
            $user->setPassword($encoded);
            $user->setCreationDate(new \DateTime());            



            // @todo: refactor
            $entityManager = $this->getDoctrine()->getManager();
            $plainpwd = $user->getPassword();
            $encoded = $this->passwordEncoder->encodePassword($user, $plainpwd);
            $user->setPassword($encoded);
            $entityManager->persist($user);
            $entityManager->flush();

And finally start the server.

symfony server:start --no-tls

github: https://github.com/xdth/symfony5_auth_crud