Bundles of Joy!

Bundles are a hipster buzzword in the Symfony world. Yea, they're cool but we really deserve all the credit! A bundle is just a place for us to put our hard-earned code. We might make an EventBundle directory for that feature and a UserBundle where we build the registration and login stuff.

We'll put anything and everything into a bundle: PHP code, config, templates, CSS and cats. We can also put other people's bundles into our project. A bundle in Symfony is similar to a plugin in other systems, but, ya know, way more hipster.

The Console

Yes, we can create bundles manually. But I'd rather have someone else do it for me. Meet console: a magic executable file in the app/. Run it to see all of the tricks it knows:

php app/console

Woh! All those green words are different console commands, including a lot things that help you work with the database and debug. I like tools as much as any programmer geek, so we'll use a lot of these over time.

Generating the EventBundle

For now run the generate:bundle command:

php app/console generate:bundle

For the bundle namespace, type Yoda/EventBundle. A bundle namespace always has two parts: a vendor name and a name describing the bundle. In honor of the Jedi master, we'll use "Yoda" for the first part and EventBundle for the second. Unless you also work for Yoda, you'll probably use your company or project name instead. Keep these as short as possible to save typing later.

Next, it wants a nickname for our bundle. We're going to be writing this a lot, and lets face it, we're busy people. So, let's choose something short, like EventBundle. The only rule is that this ends with Bundle.

Use the target default directory, but choose yml as the configuration format. You'll just have to trust me on this part - we'll check out the annotation configuration format later.

For the rest of the questions, just hit the enter key wildly. And once the console-gnomes are finished, we have a brand new bundle.

What the Generator Did

This did exactly three things for us.

First, it made a src/Yoda/EventBundle directory with some sample bundle files.

Second, it plugged our bundle into the motherboard by adding a line in the AppKernel class.

Third, it added a line to the routing.yml file that imports routes from the bundle. Contain your excitement: we're about 30 seconds from talking about this part.

The PHPStorm Symfony Plugin

But I want to share a quick secret first. If you're using PHPStorm like I am, I need you to download an aewsome Symfony plugin. For everyone else, this is totally not needed, it just adds some shortcuts.

Once it's installed, you need to activate it. We're now super-charged with a ton of Symfony-specific help. You'll see this along the way.