How to Properly Autowire a Symfony Console App

I was working on a project for a client with a huge, old-school inventory system that needed to sync with WooCommerce. The only way to get the data out was a daily CSV dump. Total mess. We decided the only sane way forward was a standalone CLI tool—something we could stick on a cron job and let it run. The Symfony console component is my go-to for this stuff, but as the tool grew, so did the complexity.

My first pass at the commands was straightforward. Just instantiate whatever services I needed in the constructor. But by the time I added the third command for handling product variations, the dependency chain was getting ugly. I was passing the same half-dozen objects around everywhere. It was fragile and a pain to test. This is a classic sign you need proper Symfony console autowiring.

Manually wiring dependencies is a path to madness. You change one constructor, and you have to go fix it in ten different places. Trust me on this. The right way is to let Symfony’s Dependency Injection container handle the heavy lifting.

Setting Up a Real Symfony Console Autowiring System

Most tutorials you find on standalone Symfony console apps skip the dependency injection part, which is a huge mistake. The whole point of using a framework component is to leverage its power. So, let’s set it up right. First, you need the right Composer packages.

{
    "require": {
        "symfony/config": "^5.4",
        "symfony/console": "^5.4",
        "symfony/dependency-injection": "^5.4",
        "symfony/yaml": "^5.4"
    }
}

Next, you need a configuration file to tell the container how to behave. I usually create a config directory and put a services.yml file inside. This is where the magic happens. We’ll tell it to autowire everything by default and tag all our console commands.

services:
  _defaults:
    autowire: true
    autoconfigure: true

  App\:
    resource: '../src/*'

  App\Application:
    public: true
    arguments:
      - !tagged console.command

  _instanceof:
    Symfony\Component\Console\Command\Command:
      tags: ['console.command']

Here’s the kicker: the _instanceof section automatically applies the console.command tag to any class that extends the base Symfony Command. Then, we tell our main Application class to accept any service tagged with console.command as an argument. The container finds all of them and injects them for you. No more manual $application->add(new MyCommand(...)) nonsense. This setup is heavily inspired by a great post over at carlalexander.ca, which is a fantastic resource.

So, What’s the Point?

Yeah, it’s a bit of boilerplate. You have to create the config file and the main executable. But you do it once. After that, adding a new command is trivial:

• Create a new command class that extends Symfony\Component\Console\Command\Command.
• Type-hint your dependencies in the constructor.
• The container automatically finds the class, injects its dependencies, and adds it to the application. Done.

This approach saves you from a maintenance nightmare down the road. Your code is cleaner, decoupled, and way easier to test because you can mock dependencies without a second thought. It’s how you build a professional, maintainable CLI tool, not just a one-off script.

Look, this stuff gets complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.