Templates

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.

The slim/twig-view component

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 SlimContainer;

// Register component on container
$container["view"] = function ($c) {
    $view = new SlimViewsTwig("path/to/templates", [
        "cache" => "path/to/cache"
    ]);
    $view->addExtension(new SlimViewsTwigExtension(
        $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
$app = new SlimApp($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 theSlimViewsTwig instance returned by the view container service. The SlimViewsTwiginstance’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 path_for() method

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:

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="{{ path_for("profile", { "name": "josh" }) }}">Josh</a></li>
</ul>
{% endblock %}

Other template systems

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.