Migrating Laravel to Symfony Without Rewriting Your Domain

Book: Decoupled PHP — Clean and Hexagonal Architecture for Applications That Outlive the Framework Also by me: Thinking in Go (2-book series) — Complete Guide to Go Programming + Hexagonal Architecture in Go My project: Hermes IDE | GitHub — an IDE for developers who ship with Claude Code and other AI coding tools Me: xgabriel.com | GitHub You've been handed the ticket everyone dreads: move the app off Laravel and onto Symfony. Maybe the team standardized on Symfony. Maybe a Messenger-and-Doctrine shop acquired you. Maybe someone decided Eloquent's global scopes had cost enough Friday nights. The estimate comes back in quarters. Someone quotes the phrase "big rewrite" and the room goes quiet, because everyone remembers the last big rewrite. Here is the question that decides whether this is a quarter or a year: how much of your business logic imports the framework? If your PlaceOrder logic reaches into request() , calls Order::create() on an Eloquent model, and opens a transaction with DB::transaction() , then the framework is the application and you are rewriting the application. If your business rules sit in plain PHP classes that never heard of Laravel, then the migration is an adapter swap, and adapter swaps ship one route at a time. What the framework actually owns Strip a typical Laravel app down and you find three categories of code. The first is your domain and use cases: the rules about what an order is, what placing one means, when it can be cancelled. This is the part the business pays for. It should not import a framework at all. The second is glue that translates the outside world into calls on that logic: controllers, form requests, Eloquent models, queue jobs, service providers. This is framework-specific by definition. The third is infrastructure your code talks to through interfaces: the database, the queue, the mailer, the payment gateway. A framework migration only touches the second category. The trouble is that most Laravel apps let the first and