The PHPBuilder.com site has posted a tutorial talking about dependency injection in PHP applications covering not only the use of dependency injection (DI) containers but also constructor, setter, property and reflection based injection methods.

Dependency injection is a software design pattern that implements the inversion of a control concept for resolving dependencies. According to this concept, a class should not configure its dependencies statically, but should be configured from the outside.

A dependency is an object that can be used (a service) and an injection is the passing of a dependency to a dependent object (a client) that would use it. Passing the service to the client, rather than allowing a client to build or find the service, is the fundamental requirement of the pattern.

The tutorial starts out with a simple example of a set of classes that depend on each other through the creation of internal objects. They then show how the different types of dependency injection can help reduce these dependencies with brief descriptions and sample code for each. The final example, a dependency injection container, gives a quick example but also links to several package options you could pull into your application including Pimple, Aura.Di and PHP-DI.