May 16, 2018 Javier Eguiluz

In Symfony 3.4 we made all Symfony services private by default. This is generally better and makes applications more robust (as explained in the previous post) but it also has some drawbacks.

The debug:container command for example hides the private services by default, so it's no longer useful to list the services available in your application. That's why in Symfony 4.1 we've changed the debug:container command to show the private services by default and we've also deprecated the --show-private option.

Independently from being public or private, sometimes it's useful to hide some services from the debug:container listing because they are not intended for being used by the developers. In those cases, you can add a dot character ( . ) at the beginning of the service ID to turn it into a "hidden service".

Hidden services behave like the rest of services, except for the fact that they are not included by default in the output of debug:container , so you must add the new --show-hidden option to show them:

1 $ ./bin/console debug:container --show-hidden

We are already using this feature to hide some internal Symfony services created by the Lock component.