With a technical team of five people, the Yuka app, which evaluates the quality of food and cosmetic products, handles more than 70 scans per second and serves 68 million users worldwide.
While the mobile application continues to grow, boasting more than 5 million products referenced in 13 countries, its technical platform has just reached a major milestone by moving from Symfony 4 to Symfony 7, with the help of SensioLabs, the organization behind Symfony.
Three major challenges guided this modernization:
- Performance optimization by integrating the latest PHP language standards and Symfony. Yuka implemented advanced caching systems that drastically reduce the number of server requests and infrastructure costs.
- Security of the application with the latest security fixes and a guaranteed support window until the end of 2028.
- Recruitment facilitation by adopting the market’s most up-to-date technologies to attract the best talent more easily.
A step-by-step upgrade
According to SensioLabs, the migration did not happen all at once.
Originally built on Symfony 4 and EasyAdmin 1 for its admin interface, the application progressed version by version: Symfony 5, then 6, and finally 7, with EasyAdmin upgraded in parallel to version 4.
This project went hand in hand with an overhaul of the entire technical environment, moving from PHP 7.4 to PHP 8.3 and upgrading Doctrine ORM from version 2 to 3.
This carefully planned sequencing allowed the team to follow Symfony’s best practices and avoid unwanted surprises, as migrating to the latest Symfony and EasyAdmin required substantial code refactoring due to evolving standards and the need to adapt EasyAdmin customizations.
An opportunity to tool up and harden the code
Beyond the mere version upgrade, this initiative gave Yuka a chance to strengthen its development practices.
Still according to SensioLabs, the team notably established a Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline, harmonized coding practices using PHPStan, Rector and PHP CS Fixer, and strengthened test coverage.
Regular code reviews and regression testing were also set up to ensure long-term performance and code quality.
This modernization also provided Yuka with the opportunity to contribute concretely to the open-source ecosystem. Contributions focused on several third-party bundles, including NzoUrlEncryptorBundle, kreait/firebase-bundle and algolia/search-bundle, as well as on EasyAdminBundle itself.
“It was essential for us not to remain stuck on an aging version. Thanks to Symfony’s architecture, we were able to modernize our technical core and propel our application to a global scale,” summarizes François Martin, cofounder and CTO of Yuka.
