# Introduction

Welcome to the documentation for Twig, the flexible, fast, and secure template engine for PHP.

Twig is 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 their own custom tags and filters, and to create their own DSL.

Twig is used by many Open-Source projects like Symfony, Drupal8, eZPublish, phpBB, Matomo, OroCRM; and many frameworks have support for it as well like Slim, Yii, Laravel, and Codeigniter — just to name a few.

Screencast

Like to learn from video tutorials? Check out the SymfonyCasts Twig Tutorial!

## Prerequisites

Twig 3.x needs at least PHP 7.2.5 to run.

## Installation

The recommended way to install Twig is via Composer:

    composer require "twig/twig:^3.0"

## Basic API Usage

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

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

    $loader = new \Twig\Loader\ArrayLoader([
        'index' => 'Hello {{ name }}!',
    ]);
    $twig = new \Twig\Environment($loader);

    echo $twig->render('index', ['name' => 'Fabien']);

Twig uses a loader (`\Twig\Loader\ArrayLoader`) to locate templates, and an environment (`\Twig\Environment`) to store its 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\FilesystemLoader('/path/to/templates');
    $twig = new \Twig\Environment($loader, [
        'cache' => '/path/to/compilation_cache',
    ]);

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