Contributed by
Iltar van der Berg
in #18510.

In Symfony applications, controllers that make use of the base Controller class can get the object that represents the current user via the getUser() shortcut:

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use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\Controller;

class DefaultController extends Controller
{
    public function indexAction()
    {
        $user = $this->getUser();
       // ...
    }
}

In the past, you could also get the current request object with the getRequest() shortcut, which was deprecated in Symfony 2.4 in favor of the Request type-hint:

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use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\Controller;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;

class DefaultController extends Controller
{
    public function indexAction(Request $request) { ... }
}

In Symfony 3.2, we've added a new user resolver that allows to get the current user in any controller via type-hinting and we deprecated the Controller::getUser() shortcut, which will be removed in Symfony 4.0:

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use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\Controller;
use Symfony\Component\Security\Core\User\UserInterface;

class DefaultController extends Controller
{
    // when the user is mandatory (e.g. behind a firewall)
    public function fooAction(UserInterface $user) { ... }

    // when the user is optional (e.g. can be anonymous)
    public function barAction(UserInterface $user = null) { ... }
}

This feature uses the argument resolver extension mechanism that was introduced in Symfony 3.1. This mechanism allows to register your own value resolvers for controller arguments.