Templates

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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 slim/twig-view component

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
Figure 1: Install slim/twig-view component.

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));
Figure 2: Add slim/twig-view middleware.

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();
Figure 3: Render template with slim/twig-view container service.

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 url_for() method

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:

  1. A route name
  2. A hash of route placeholder names and replacement values

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 slim/php-view component

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
Figure 6: Install slim/php-view component.

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();
Figure 8: Render template with slim/php-view service.

Other template systems

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.