Slim does not have a view layer like traditional MVC frameworks. Instead, Slim’s “view” is the HTTP response. Each Slim application route is responsible for preparing and returning an appropriate PSR 7 response object.
Slim’s “view” is the HTTP response.
That being said, Slim does provide the optional slim/twig-view PHP component to help you render Twig templates to a PSR 7 Response object. This component is available on Packagist, and it’s easy to install with Composer like this:
composer require slim/twig-view
Figure 1: Install slim/twig-view component.
Next, you need to register the component as a service on the Slim app’s container like this:
<?php
// Create container
$container = new \Slim\Container;
// Register component on container
$container['view'] = function ($c) {
$view = new \Slim\Views\Twig('path/to/templates', [
'cache' => 'path/to/cache'
]);
$view->addExtension(new \Slim\Views\TwigExtension(
$c['router'],
$c['request']->getUri()
));
return $view;
};
Figure 2: Register slim/twig-view component with container.
Note : “cache” could be set to false to disable it, see also ‘auto_reload’ option, usefull in development environnement. For more information, see Twig environment options
Now you can use the slim/twig-view
component service inside an app route to render a template and write it to a PSR 7 Response object like this:
// Create app
$app = new \Slim\App($container);
// Render Twig template in route
$app->get('/hello/{name}', function ($request, $response, $args) {
return $this->view->render($response, 'profile.html', [
'name' => $args['name']
]);
})->setName('profile');
// Run app
$app->run();
Figure 3: Render template with slim/twig-view container service.
In this example, $this->view
invoked inside the route callback is a reference to the\Slim\Views\Twig
instance returned by the view
container service. The \Slim\Views\Twig
instance’s render()
method accepts a PSR 7 Response object as its first argument, the Twig template path as its second argument, and an array of template variables as its final argument. The render()
method returns a new PSR 7 Response object whose body is the rendered Twig template.
The slim/twig-view
component exposes a custom path_for()
function to your Twig templates. You can use this function to generate complete URLs to any named route in your Slim application. The path_for()
function accepts two arguments:
The second argument’s keys should correspond to the selected route’s pattern placeholders. This is an example Twig template that draws a link URL for the “profile” named route shown in the example Slim application above.
{% extends "layout.html" %}
{% block body %}
<h1>User List</h1>
<ul>
<li><a href="{{ path_for('profile', { 'name': 'josh' }) }}">Josh</a></li>
</ul>
{% endblock %}
You are not limited to the slim/twig-view
component. You can use any PHP template system assuming you ultimately write the rendered template output to the PSR 7 Response object’s body.