In this new post to his site Joshua Thijssen talks about something that's usually considered a common task and might be overlooked when it comes to security: logging out (specifically in Symfony-based applications).

One of the “golden rules” of symfony2 is to never hardcode urls or paths inside your code or templates. And letting symfony deal with the generation of your urls and paths makes your life a lot easier as a developer. But one of the things I see regularly is that people are still hardcoding their logout urls like using “/logout”. But logging out is actually a bit more complex than it might seem, and using a simple /logout might work for most cases, but there are better ways to deal with this.

To give some context, he starts with an overview of the Security component of the Symfony framework, mentioning how it can be configured with different "secure" areas and how they handle the user authentication. He includes an example configuration of one of these "firewalls" in a YAML document with three different sections: "dev", "superadminstuff" and "main". He explains what each of these sections are configuring and how they will react when the user visits them. He talks some about the "logout: true" handling and what kind of defaults are also included when it's called. He suggests that, instead of a hard-coded "logout" URL in your application, you make use of the "logout_url" and "logout_path" functions to create the link for you, making it consistent across the application and easier to configure.