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, the Slim project provides the Twig-View and PHP-View components to help you render templates to a PSR7 Response object.
The Twig-View PHP component helps you render Twig templates in your application. This component is available on Packagist, and it’s easy to install with Composer like this:
composer require slim/twig-view
Next, you need to add the slim/twig-view middleware to the Slim app:
<?php
use Slim\Factory\AppFactory;
use Slim\Views\Twig;
use Slim\Views\TwigMiddleware;
require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
// Create App
$app = AppFactory::create();
// Create Twig
$twig = Twig::create('path/to/templates', ['cache' => false]);
// Add Twig-View Middleware
$app->add(TwigMiddleware::create($app, $twig));
Note : For production scenarios, cache
should be set to some 'path/to/cache'
to store compiled templates (thus avoiding recomplication on every request). 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:
$app->get('/hello/{name}', function ($request, $response, $args) {
$view = Twig::fromRequest($request);
return $view->render($response, 'profile.html', [
'name' => $args['name']
]);
})->setName('profile');
// Run app
$app->run();
In this example, $view
invoked inside the route callback is a reference
to the \Slim\Views\Twig
instance returned by the fromRequest
method.
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 url_for()
function
to your Twig templates. You can use this function to generate complete
URLs to any named route in your Slim application. The url_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="{{ url_for('profile', { 'name': 'josh' }) }}">Josh</a></li>
</ul>
{% endblock %}
The PHP-View PHP component helps you render PHP templates. This component is available on Packagist and can be installed using Composer like this:
composer require slim/php-view
You can use it with Slim like this:
<?php
use Slim\Factory\AppFactory;
use Slim\Views\PhpRenderer;
require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
// Create App
$app = AppFactory::create();
$app->get('/hello/{name}', function ($request, $response, $args) {
$renderer = new PhpRenderer('path/to/templates');
return $renderer->render($response, "hello.php", $args);
})->setName('profile');
$app->run();
You are not limited to the Twig-View
and PHP-View
components. You
can use any PHP template system provided that you ultimately write the rendered
template output to the PSR-7 Response object’s body.