Installing Flex

Our project is now on Symfony 4.0, and it still works! Well, it almost works: we would just need to remove a few references to SensioDistributionBundle and SensioGeneratorBundle.

The point is this: if you want, you can upgrade to Symfony 4, but not migrate to the new Flex project structure. That's fine.

But... since Flex is awesome... let's do it!

Flex: Composer Plugin & New BFF

Flex is a Composer plugin, and, it's pretty simple: when you install a package, it checks to see if there is a recipe for that package. A recipe can add configuration files, auto-enable the bundle, add paths to your .gitignore file and more. But, for Flex to work, you need to use the Flex directory structure.

Upgrade to Flex: The Plan

So here's the plan: we're going to bootstrap a new Flex application right inside our existing project. Then, little-by-little, we'll move our code and configuration into it. It's going to be pretty freakin' cool.

Upgrade Composer. For Real

Before we start, make sure that your Composer is at the latest version:

composer self-update

Seriously, do this. Composer recently released a bug fix that helps Flex.

Installing Flex

Ok, so... let's install Flex!

composer require symfony/flex

As soon as this is in our project, it will find and install recipes each time we add a new library to our project. In fact, check it out!

Configuring symfony/flex

Ha! Flex even installed a recipe for itself! What an over-achiever! Let's find out what it did:

git status

Of course, it modified composer.json and composer.lock. But there are two new files: .env.dist and symfony.lock. Open the first.

How did this get here? It was added by the symfony/flex recipe! More about this file later.

Next, look at symfony.lock. This file is managed by Flex: it keeps track of which recipes were installed. You should commit it, but not think about it.

Installing Missing Recipes

Because this is an existing project, our app already contains a bunch of vendor libraries... and a lot of these might have recipes that were never installed because Flex wasn't in our project yet! Lame! No problem! Empty the vendor/ directory and run composer install

rm -rf vendor
composer install

Normally, Flex only installs a recipe when you first composer require a library. But Flex knows that the recipes for these libraries were never installed. So it runs them now.

Yea! 11 recipes! Woh! And one of them is from the "contrib" repository. There are two repositories for recipes. The official one is heavily guarded for quality. The "contrib" one also has some checks, but the quality is not guaranteed. That's why you see this question. I'll type "p" to permanently allow recipes from contrib.

Run git status to see what changed:

git status

Woh! We have a new config/ directory and a lot more! Starting with nothing, Flex is scaffolding the new project around us! It's even auto-enabling all the bundles in a new bundles.php file.

Sweet!

The Flex composer.json

When you start a new Flex project, you actually clone this symfony/skeleton repository... which is literally one file: composer.json. This has a few really important things in it, including the fact that it requires symfony/framework-bundle but not symfony/symfony.

Let's work on that next!