Hey Reader,

This week, we're heading back to the basics and talking all about Magento's dependency injection container: Object Manager.

While you probably know not to use OM directly, ...do you know why? This tripped me up for a while, but it's an absolute must-know for any backend Magento dev.

When I interviewed Magento developers for open positions, asking "Explain what Object Manager is and why it works" was always one of my favorite types of interview questions, because 1) it's open-ended (so you can easily tell if someone is using an AI to answer), and 2) it shows their breadth of knowledge of M2.

If you're not completely sure what Magento's Object Manager is and how it works, or just want a refresher, this week is for you 👇

Keep coding,

Mark Shust Teacher / M.academy Say hi 👋 on LinkedIn & YouTube​

Explore application modes in Magento

If you just installed Magento, it comes with "default" mode toggled on by default. But this is the worst application mode available, because it's not good for development or production. Find out why:

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Understanding Object Manager in Magento 2

Why use dependency injection to create objects in Magento, and why does Object Manager exist?

...and would you ever want to use Object Manager directly in your code? The answer may surprise you 🤔:

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OM: The Container Class What really is Magento's object manager? Well, it has to do with dependency injection. Magento's Object Manager works hand-in-hand with the dependency injection (DI) layer in Magento 2; you can't really have one without the other. The Dependency Inversion principle states that high-level modules with complex logic should be easily reusable, and that abstractions should not depend on the details (aka concrete/standard classes). When you flip around how dependencies are created and rather "inject" them into constructors, you are delegating the task of creating and managing these objects. And they are delegated to what is called a "dependency injection container" class. In Magento, the DI container class is the Object Manager. This is the class responsible for loading and handling all of the dependencies of just about all objects in the framework. This allows you to request an instance of an object, and not care about how its internal dependencies are handled. You'll just get back your intended object, complete with all of its loaded dependencies.

Set developer mode in Magento

Now that you know why you need developer mode enabled, let's go ahead and toggle it on, so Magento can create static assets and generated code automatically:

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Want to dive much deeper?

We talked about Magento's "object manager", ...but there are hundreds of other concepts in Magento you need to know.

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