---
title: "Introduction"
description: "Introduction — Symfony Messenger BabelQueue adapter (1.x)."
source: https://babelqueue.com/docs/symfony/1.x/introduction/
updated: 2026-06-07T00:00:00.000Z
---

# Introduction

The **Symfony** adapter plugs BabelQueue into **Symfony Messenger**. You keep
Messenger's transports, handlers, worker and retry — BabelQueue only changes the
**wire format** to the canonical, language-agnostic envelope, so your Symfony
services exchange messages with Laravel, Go, Python, Java, .NET and Node over one
strict JSON format, on the broker you already run.

It is a thin adapter built on the shared core ([`babelqueue/php-sdk`](https://packagist.org/packages/babelqueue/php-sdk)),
which owns the one codec and contract.

## What you get

- **Messenger serializer.** A drop-in `SerializerInterface` (`babelqueue.messenger.serializer`)
  that encodes/decodes the canonical envelope (`schema_version: 1`) on any Messenger
  transport — AMQP/RabbitMQ, Redis, and more.
- **`PolyglotMessage` contract.** Mark a message class with its URN and a pure-array
  payload; everything else stays idiomatic Messenger.
- **URN routing on consume.** Inbound envelopes are mapped from their URN back to your
  message class via a small registry.
- **Retry bridge.** Messenger's `RedeliveryStamp` ⇄ the envelope's top-level
  `attempts`, in both directions.
- **Automatic `trace_id` propagation.** A middleware forwards the inbound `trace_id`
  onto any message a handler dispatches, so a chain of work stays in one trace.

## The envelope

```json
{
  "job": "urn:babel:orders:created",
  "trace_id": "7b3f9c2a-e41d-4f88-9b2a-1c0d5e6f7a8b",
  "data": { "order_id": 1042 },
  "meta": { "id": "f1e2d3c4-b5a6-4789-90ab-cdef01234567", "queue": "orders", "lang": "php", "schema_version": 1, "created_at": 1749132727000 },
  "attempts": 0
}
```

See the full [wire contract](/docs/spec/1.x/envelope/). Continue to
[Installation](/docs/symfony/1.x/installation/).