Redirecting from a Controller

In this chapter, we wrote a Controller that returns a render array. We know from the preceding chapter that this is picked up by the theme system and turned into a response. In Chapter 4, Theming, we will go into a bit more detail and see how this process is done. However, this render pipeline can also be bypassed if the Controller returns a response directly. Let's consider the following example:

return new \Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response('my text');  

This will bypass much of that processing and return a blank white page with only the "my text" string on it. The Response class we're using is from the Symfony HTTP Foundation component.

However, we also have a handy RedirectResponse class that we can use, and it will redirect the browser to another page:

return new \Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\RedirectResponse('node/1')  

The first parameter is the URL where we want to redirect. Typically, this should be an absolute URL; however, browsers nowadays are smart enough to handle a relative path as well. So, in this case, the Controller will redirect us to that path.