Is Laravel Built on Symfony? An In-Depth Analysis

When diving into web development frameworks, it's crucial to understand their components and origins. One popular question that arises among developers is whether Laravel, the PHP framework known for its elegant syntax and ease of use, is built on Symfony, another renowned framework. To address this, let's take a closer look at the composer.json file of Laravel, which holds the key to answering our question.

The Role of Symfony Components in Laravel

The composer.json file of the Laravel framework reveals that it heavily relies on Symfony components. This dependency isn't surprising since Laravel was initially a candidate framework for Symfony back in 2011. Eventually, it turned into a standalone project, but the relationship with Symfony remained strong. Here, we will explore how Laravel integrates with Symfony components and discuss the nature of this integration.

Integration Through Dependencies

By examining the composer.json file, we can see a list of dependencies, many of which are Symfony packages. These dependencies serve different purposes within the Laravel framework. Some are used for core functionalities, while others are used for optimizing performance or providing additional features.

{    require: {        php: 7.3.0,        ext-bcmath: *,        ext-curl: *,        ext-gd: 2.0.0,        ext-intl: 2.0.0,        ext-mbstring: *,        ext-tokenizer: *,        ext-xml: *,        ext-zip: *,        psr/container: 1.0.0,        psr/log: ~1.0,        psr/simple-cache: ~1.0,        symfony/console: 4.3,7.0,        symfony/error-handler: 4.3,7.0,        symfony/event-dispatcher: 4.3,7.0,        symfony/flex: ^1.9|^2.0