Attention

TYPO3 v10 has reached end-of-life as of April 30th 2023 and is no longer being maintained. Use the version switcher on the top left of this page to select documentation for a supported version of TYPO3.

Need more time before upgrading? You can purchase Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) for TYPO3 v10 here: TYPO3 ELTS.

Introduction

This document describes the services functionality included in the TYPO3 CMS core.

Note

The "Services" API is one of the older core API's that did not found much traction over the years. The core itself only uses it for frontend and backend user authentication.

Additionally, only a couple of extensions use the Services API, and not much happened to the underlying codebase lately. Extension authors may want to ignore this API for new stuff and implement own factory or service related patterns that may better fit needs.

Important

This chapter is about the "Services API" provided by the core. Don't confuse it with casual PHP classes within the directory Classes/Service found in many extensions - they usually do not use the API mentioned here.

Classes in the scope of this chapter - directly or indirectly - extend the service class TYPO3\CMS\Core\Service\AbstractService.

In comparison, for additional information on what the core usually understands as "casual" service class, see the coding guidelines.

The whole services API works as a registry. Services are registered with a number of parameters, and each service can easily be overridden by another one with improved features or more specific capabilities, for example. This can be achieved without having to change the original code of TYPO3 CMS or of an extension.

Services are simply PHP classes packaged inside an extension. The usual way to instantiate a class in TYPO3 CMS is:

$object = \TYPO3\CMS\Core\Utility\GeneralUtility::makeInstance(
   \TYPO3\CMS\Frontend\ContentObject\ContentObjectRenderer::class);

Getting a service instance is achieved using a different API. The PHP class is not directly referenced. Instead a service is identified by its type:

$serviceObject = \TYPO3\CMS\Core\Utility\GeneralUtility::makeInstanceService('my_service_type');

The same service can be provided by different extensions. The service with the highest priority and quality (more on that later) is chosen automatically for you.

Two Reasons to Use Services

1. Freedom of Implementation

A service may be implemented multiple times to take into account different environments like operating systems (Unix, Windows, Mac), available PHP extensions or other third-party dependencies (other programming languages, binaries, etc.).

Imagine an extension which could rely on a Perl script for very good results. Another implementation could exist, that relies only on PHP, but gives results of lesser quality. With a service you could switch automatically between the two implementations just by testing the availability or not of Perl on the server.

2. Extend Functionality with Extensions

Services are able to handle subtypes. Consider the services of type "auth" which perform both the frontend and backend authentication. They provide a total of six subtypes, each of which can be overridden independently by extensions.

The base service class (\TYPO3\CMS\Core\Authentication\AuthenticationService) provided by extension "core" is extended by both "saltedpasswords" and "rsaauth" extensions but for different subtypes ("authUserFE" and "authUserBE" for the former, "processLoginDataBE" and "processLoginDataFE" for the latter).

These overrides do not change the public API of the "auth" service type, meaning that developers can rely on it without worrying about what other extensions might be doing.