PHP › Symfony Framework Essentials

What is Symfony, and what makes it a popular choice for building both full web applications and reusable PHP components?

Beginner

Answer

Symfony is a mature, widely used PHP framework for building web applications, offering a well structured approach with strong conventions around routing, controllers, services, and templating, and one of its distinguishing characteristics is that it is also built from a large collection of independent, reusable components, many of which are used internally by other frameworks and popular PHP projects, meaning that even developers not using the full Symfony framework often still benefit from its components indirectly.
composer create-project symfony/skeleton my-project
cd my-project
symfony server:start
Real-world example A company chooses Symfony for a large, long term enterprise application specifically because of its strong architectural conventions and its reputation for stability and long term support across major versions.

Common follow-ups: What is the difference between Symfony's full framework and its individual standalone components?;How does Symfony compare to Laravel in terms of typical use cases?