Introduction
============

This is the documentation for Twig, the flexible, fast, and secure template
engine for PHP.

If you have any exposure to other text-based template languages, such as
Smarty, Django, or Jinja, you should feel right at home with Twig. It's both
designer and developer friendly by sticking to PHP's principles and adding
functionality useful for templating environments.

The key-features are...

* *Fast*: Twig compiles templates down to plain optimized PHP code. The
  overhead compared to regular PHP code was reduced to the very minimum.

* *Secure*: Twig has a sandbox mode to evaluate untrusted template code. This
  allows Twig to be used as a template language for applications where users
  may modify the template design.

* *Flexible*: Twig is powered by a flexible lexer and parser. This allows the
  developer to define its own custom tags and filters, and create its own DSL.

Prerequisites
-------------

Twig needs at least **PHP 5.2.4** to run.

Installation
------------

The recommended way to install Twig is via Composer:

.. code-block:: bash

    composer require "twig/twig:1.*"

.. note::

    To learn more about the other installation methods, read the
    :doc:`installation<installation>` chapter; it also explains how to install
    the Twig C extension.

Basic API Usage
---------------

This section gives you a brief introduction to the PHP API for Twig.

.. code-block:: php

    require_once '/path/to/vendor/autoload.php';

    $loader = new Twig_Loader_String();
    $twig = new Twig_Environment($loader);

    echo $twig->render('Hello {{ name }}!', array('name' => 'Fabien'));

Twig uses a loader (``Twig_Loader_String``) to locate templates, and an
environment (``Twig_Environment``) to store the configuration.

The ``render()`` method loads the template passed as a first argument and
renders it with the variables passed as a second argument.

As templates are generally stored on the filesystem, Twig also comes with a
filesystem loader::

    $loader = new Twig_Loader_Filesystem('/path/to/templates');
    $twig = new Twig_Environment($loader, array(
        'cache' => '/path/to/compilation_cache',
    ));

    echo $twig->render('index.html', array('name' => 'Fabien'));

.. tip::

    If you are not using Composer, use the Twig built-in autoloader::

        require_once '/path/to/lib/Twig/Autoloader.php';
        Twig_Autoloader::register();
