The problem

The other day I was playing with the Symfony Demo application, in which the routing is simply defined as:

# app/config/routing.yml
app:
    resource: @AppBundle/Controller/
    type:     annotation

I had a BlogController.php file with @Route() annotations in src/AppBundle/Controller/BlogController.php file.

Then, I moved this controller to the src/AppBundle/Controller/Admin/ folder without updating the namespace of the PHP class. Then, the application displayed the following error message:

FileLoaderImportCircularReferenceException in FileLoader.php line 97:
Circular reference detected in "/Users/javier/sf/symfony-demo/app/config/routing_dev.yml" 
("/Users/javier/sf/symfony-demo/app/config/routing_dev.yml" >
"/Users/javier/sf/symfony-demo/app/config/routing.yml" >
"/Users/javier/sf/symfony-demo/src/AppBundle/Controller/" >
"/Users/javier/sf/symfony-demo/app/config/routing_dev.yml").

Sadly this error message is very misleading because CircularReferenceException message looks scary and the error keeps talking about the routing_dev.yml file, which has nothing to do with the actual error.

The solution

Symfony already includes some great error messages when you are warned about typos and PHP classes mislocations. I'd like to see a better error message when the namespace of a controller file is not correct.