This article shows an example of framework decoupling. You’ll find a more elaborate discussion in my latest book, Recipes for Decoupling.

Why would it be nice to decouple your user model from the framework’s security user or authentication model?

Reason 1: Hexagonal architecture

I like to use hexagonal architecture in my applications, which means among other things that the entities from my domain model stay behind a port. They are never exposed to, for instance, a controller, or a template. Whenever I want to show anything to the user, I create a dedicated view model for it.

Symfony2 firewalls depend for their authentication on UserProviders. These providers are requested by the authentication layer to provide a User object, for a given username. Symfony will check whether the password of this User is correct (i.e. verify it’s password) and will then generate a security token, so the user may stay authenticated during the current session. Out of the box, Symfony has a “in_memory” user provider and an “entity” user provider. In this post I’ll show you how to create your own UserProvider. The UserProvider in this example, tries to load a Yaml file containing information about users in the following format: