Proper Bundle composer.json File

We put the bundle into our app temporarily because it made it really easy to hack on the bundle, test in the app and repeat.

But now that it's getting kinda stable, it's time to move the bundle into its own directory with its own repository. It's like watching your kid grow up, and finally move into their own apartment.

Find your terminal, and kick that lazy bundle out of your house and into a new directory next door:

mv lib/LoremIpsumBundle ../LoremIpsumBundle

In PhpStorm, let's open that second directory inside a new window, and re-decorate things a little bit. Ok, a lot to keep track of: application code, bundle code and terminal. To confuse things more, open a third terminal tab and move it into the bundle, which, sadly, does not have a git repository yet!

Let's add one!

git init
git status

Add everything and commit!

git add .
git commit -m "Unicorns"

Bootstrapping composer.json

To make this a shareable package, it needs its very-own composer.json file. To create it, run:

composer init

Let's call it knpuniversity/lorem-ipsum-bundle, give it a description, make sure the author is correct, leave minimum-stability alone and, for "Package Type" - this is important! - use symfony-bundle. That's needed so that Flex will automatically enable the bundle when it's installed. For License, I'll use MIT - but more on that later. And finally, let's not add any dependencies yet. And, generate! Let's definitely ignore the vendor/ directory.

Hello .gitignore file and hello composer.json! This file has a few purposes. First, of course, it's where we will eventually require any packages the bundle needs. We'll do that later. But I am going to start at least by saying that we require php 7.1.3. That's the version that Symfony 4.0 requires.

Autoloading Rules

Second, the composer.json file is where we define our autoloading rules: Composer needs to know what namespace our bundle uses and where those classes live.

Up until now, we put those autoload rules inside the main project. Let's steal that section and remove the line for our bundle. Paste that into the bundle and remove the App line. The KnpU\\LoremIpsumBundle\\ namespace lives in just, src/.

Using a "path" Repository

So... yay! We have a standalone bundle with its own repository! But, I'm not quite ready to push this to Packagist yet... and I kinda want to keep testing it inside my app. But, how? We can't composer require it until it lives on Packagist, right?

Well, there is one trick. Google for "composer path package".

Click on the "Repositories" documentation and... all the way at the bottom... there's a path option! This allows us to point to any directory on our computer that contains a composer.json file. Then, suddenly, that library becomes available to composer require.

Copy the repositories section, find our application's composer.json and, at the bottom, paste this. The library lives at ../LoremIpsumBundle.

Thanks to that, our application now knows that there is a package called knpuniversity/lorem-ipsum-bundle available. Back at the terminal, find the tab for our application and composer require knpuniversity/lorem-ipsum-bundle, with a :*@dev at the end.

composer require knpuniversity/lorem-ipsum-bundle:*@dev

A path package isn't quite as smart as a normal package: you don't have versions or anything like that: it just uses whatever code is in that directory. This tells Composer to require that package, but not worry about the version.

And, cool! On my system, it installed with a symlink, which means we can keep hacking on the bundle and testing it live in the app.

Oh, and since Symfony flex noticed that our package has a symfony-bundle type, it actually tried to configure a recipe, which would normally enable the bundle for us in bundles.php. It didn't this time, only because we already have that code.

Now that everything is reconnected, it should work! Refresh the page. Yes! That bundle is properly living on its own.

Next, we actually already have some tests for our bundle... but they still live in the app. Let's move these into the bundle and start talking about properly adding the dependencies that it needs.