Is there any chance I can avoid using eval in Twig?

[andreasciamanna]

I've been looking for a way to keep using Twig, while not using eval.

Unfortunately, not all our clients are willing to keep it enabled.

So, rather than googling and asking everywhere else (which I did anyway), I thought that this is probably the best place.

My objective is to allow Twig to work when extensions such as Suhosin are installed and eval is disabled.

I've tried to look at the code in \Twig_Environment::loadTemplate and I can't quite understand when eval('?>'.$content) is called, but it is called several times.

Regardless, I wonder if there is any way I can make Twig stop using the eval function.

[sstok]

eval is only used when you don't use a Cached template, when you use the cache eval is not used.

[stof]

@sciamannikoo if you enable the filesystem cache, eval will be used only in case of race condition on the cache access (which can be avoided if you take care of parsing all templates of your project before putting your server under load)

[rhukster]

Would be great if an alternative solution to eval() could be used. This has come up in Grav CMS chat also.

[stof]

When you enable the filesystem cache and you don't have race conditions during the cache warmup process (i.e. you're not running your cache warming under load, or you're lucky when doing it under load), eval won't be called, as the cache file will be loaded through require instead.
And once the cache warming is done, cache files are always loaded through require (allowing to benefit from OPCache for the compiled template code)

[stof]

if you disable the filesystem cache, there is no way to avoid the usage of eval (well, there might be some crazy way based on stream wrappers, but it might be limited by allow_url_include, which is a feature which is even more likely to be disabled for security reasons than eval and so won't help), as the template is compiled to PHP code which must then be loaded by PHP.

[fabpot]

Closing as @stof explained how that works really well.