28/12/2022
First impression of Sylius - open-source e-commerce platform
My name is Ihor - I’m a PHP backend engineer, and now I’m a part of the Spinbits team. A new position is usually connected with new responsibilities. One of the first challenges that I faced in this software house was Sylius - an e-commerce platform that is written in PHP programming language, which I specialize in. My task was to create a simple and fast online store. Looking at the possibilities on the market - other e-commerce platforms like PrestaShop, Magento, Shopify, and others, I realized that Sylius is one of the best possible options to choose from (if not the best ;) ).
What is Sylius?
Sylius is a modern, open-source e-commerce platform that helps different companies create and manage their online shops. It is built on the Symfony framework, which makes it reliable and scalable. Sylius also offers a wide range of features and can be easily customized to fit any need. This is why you can use this platform to create your online stores quickly. What’s more, Sylius is fully covered with tests and has a modular structure, REST/XML API, plugins, and more. Sylius community combines their personal slack chat (over 4000 IT engineers) and all Symfony community which has over 600 000 developers. It’s impressive, isn’t it?
Getting started with the Sylius platform
How did I start working with Sylius? I started from scratch - reading the official documentation of this platform, which I found on the side for Sylius developers. I found out, that the latest stable Sylius version is 1.12, which supports Symfony 6 and PHP 8.1. In the latest version, the developers team added a lot of changes and features, including official Docker image, API Platform v2.7 support, Swiftmailer replaced by SymfonyMailer, Gulp replaced by Webpack, and Gaufrette replaced by Flysystem. A new minor update is planned for the second quarter of 2023. The new version of Sylius (1.13) will also be released in 2023, but a little bit later.
In the official documentation, you can also find a lot of interesting information about Sylius, such as components, bundles, customization, payments, API, deployment, and, of course, an installation guide.
Also, on the official Sylius website, you can find demo versions of the client and administrator application, test them and check how it works. Then you can decide if you like it, or not. Get credentials here.
For me personally, there were no problems with installing and making the first configuration for a test project on Sylius. I used Docker to make the process of installation easier, after that I did database migrations and loaded fixtures. All these steps can be done during the initial configuration of the project like «Sylius install». How to run Sylius in docker you can find here
I think Sylius is one of the most promising e-commerce platforms in the future. Will you give it a chance? If you’re interested in creating your online store, please contact us.
Ihor
Backend Engineer
