Pairing Composer template for Drupal Projects with Lando gives you a fully working Drupal environment with barely any setup. Lando is an open-source, cross-platform local development environment. It uses Docker to build containers for well-known frameworks and services written in simple recipes. If you haven’t started using Lando for your local development, we highly recommend it. It is easier, faster, and relatively pain-free compared to MAMP, WAMP, VirtualBox VMs, Vagrant or building your own Docker infrastructure.

Preface We recently had the opportunity to work on a Symfony app for one of our Higher Ed clients that we recently built a Drupal distribution for. Drupal 8 moving to Symfony has enabled us to expand our service offering. We have found more opportunities building apps directly using Symfony when a CMS is not needed. This post is not about Drupal, but cross posting to Drupal Planet to demonstrate the value of getting off the island. Enjoy! Writing custom authentication schemes in Symfony used to be on the complicated side. But with the introduction of the Guard authentication component, it has gotten a lot easier.

The biggest thing that got me excited with Drupal 8 is the first-class use of services & dependency-injection throughout the entire system. From aspects like routing, templating, managing configuration, querying and persisting data, you name it -- everything is done with services. This is a great thing, because it grants developers a level of flexibility in extending Drupal that is far greater than what Drupal 7 was able to. I'll walk you through a few strategies of extending existing functionality, leveraging the power of Symfony's component.