I built an open-source static flow analyzer for Symfony — PHPFlow v0.1.0

Patrick ER — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 13:46:27 +0000

Hi everyone,

I’ve just released the first public version of PHPFlow, an open-source static flow analyzer for PHP/Symfony applications.

The idea came from a problem I regularly run into on larger applications: answering a question like “what actually happens when this route is called?” can mean jumping through a controller, several services, Messenger dispatches and handlers, repositories, database queries and external APIs.

PHPFlow analyzes the source code without running the target application and reconstructs those flows as a graph.

For example, it can help answer:

What happens when this Symfony route is called?
Which routes/messages can reach this database table?
What depends on this service?
Where is this Messenger message handled?
Which flows call this external API?
Where can this exception surface?

v0.1.0 currently understands Symfony routes, dependency injection, Messenger, repositories, Doctrine DBAL/QueryBuilder, external HTTP calls, exceptions and a number of control-flow patterns.

It also generates a self-contained interactive HTML viewer with search, functional lanes, Messenger boundaries, minimap, path-to-effects and critical-path exploration.

PHPFlow is deliberately conservative: if it cannot prove a relationship statically, it doesn’t invent one. It also never boots or executes the application being analyzed.

There’s a bundled Symfony demo, so after cloning:

make setup
make demo

I’m especially interested in trying it against real-world Symfony applications now. If you give it a try and it misses a pattern used by your project, I’d really like to hear about it.

GitHub: github.com/patryyyck/phpflow

Feedback, bug reports and criticism are very welcome.

DEV Community: Patrick ER

I built an open-source static flow analyzer for Symfony — PHPFlow v0.1.0