Publish to Packagist and Release

Our bundle is now hosted on GitHub and our continuous integration with GitHub Actions is green! To make it installable via Composer, we need to publish it on Packagist. You won't be able to follow along with this part - we don't want to flood Packagist with duplicates of our bundle. But you can use this as a guide to publish your own bundles.

Submitting to Packagist

Go to Packagist.org and sign in with your GitHub account. Click "Submit" from the top menu. For the repository URL, copy the URL of your GitHub repository and paste it in... then click "Check".

This step looks for existing packages with similar names. If there's already a package that fits your needs, you might not need to publish a new one. I see there's already a package with a similar name, but I'll proceed anyway by clicking "Submit".

And... Nice, we're on our fresh package page! A few things are happening here. First, Packagist crawls our package metadata to determine all our branches, tags, and dependencies. It also automatically sets up a GitHub webhook so that Packagist is notified to re-crawl our package whenever we push new code.

When you no longer see the "This package is not auto-updated" message, that means the webhook is set up. This can be confirmed when you see the "This package is auto-updated" message on the right sidebar.

Back on the GitHub repository page, click the "Settings" tab, then "Webhooks" from the left sidebar. This is the webhook Packagist automatically added for us.

On Packagist now, we only have this 1.x branch because we haven't created any releases.

Creating a Release

I'll create a release on GitHub by clicking "Releases" in the right sidebar and clicking "Create new release". We can choose an existing git tag to use for the release, but, since we don't have any tags yet, I'll type v1.0.0, hit "Create new tag" and then "Create" in this dialog.

GitHub has this handy button to generate release notes, so I'll click that. It autofilled the title with our tag name and generated a link to the full changelog. This isn't too exciting for an initial release but when you add subsequent releases, it generates a nice list of changes.

I'll just add one note: "Initial release" and click "Publish release".

1.0 release done! Back on our repository page, we can see the 1.0 release listed as "latest".

This should have triggered the Packagist webhook, so back on the package page on Packagist, refresh... and... there it is! Our 1.0 release is live and can now be installed with Composer!

Testing the Release

Let's see if it works! Somewhere on your system, create a new temporary Symfony app by running:

symfony new --webapp test-my-bundle

Wait for it to be created... then navigate to it:

cd test-my-bundle

Require our bundle!

symfony composer require symfonycasts/object-translation-bundle

Ok, we have an error, but look up here: Composer downloaded and installed v1.0.0 of our bundle!

The error comes from Symfony Flex. It's seeing that we installed a bundle, so it automatically enabled it in our app. The problem is, our bundle requires some configuration and an entity: the translation_class and Translation entity.

A user could probably stumble though and fix this by reading our bundle documentation, but it's kind of a bummer...

Next, we'll improve this experience by creating a Symfony Flex recipe for our bundle!