Overview¶

Dependency Injection¶

Dependency injection is a concept that has been talked about all over the web. You probably have done it without knowing that is called dependency injection. Simply put the next line of code can describe what it is:

$volvo = new Car(new Engine());

Above, Engine is a dependency of Car, and Engine was injected into Car. If you are not familiar with Dependency Injection please read this Fabien Pontencier’s great series about Dependency injection.

Dependency Injection Container¶

Dependency injection and dependency injection containers are tow different things. Dependency injection is a design pattern that implements inversion of control for resolving dependencies. On the other hand Dependency Injection Container is a tool that will help you create, reuse and inject dependencies.

A dependency container can also be used to store object instances that you create and values that you may need to use repeatedly like configuration settings.

Lets look at a very simple example:

use Slick\Di\ContainerBuilder;

$definitions = [
    'config.environment' => 'develop'
];

$container = (new ContainerBuilder($definitions))->getContainer();

print $container->get('config.environment'); // Will output 'develop'

In this code example we create a dependency container with a single definition under the config.environment key/name and retrieve it latter. For that we use the ContainerBuilder factory that need an array or a file name with an associative array of definitions that can be used to create our dependencies.

This is not a big deal so far as you are probably saying that you can achieve the same result with a global variable. In fact storing values or object instances in a container is the simplest feature of a dependency container and a side effect as the main goal is to store definitions that can be used to create the real objects when we need them.

But lets first understand what a definition is and how to set them in your container.