How to install libraries with Symfony Flex

Overview

Symfony Flex is a revolutionary tool that aims to simplify the process of managing dependencies in your Symfony applications. In this tutorial, we will walk through the steps required to install libraries using Symfony Flex and make your development journey smoother and more efficient.

Understanding Symfony Flex

Symfony Flex is a composer plugin that modifies the way Symfony applications are set up. It automates the configuration of packages you add to your application. An important part of Symfony Flex is recipes, which are a set of automated instructions to integrate and configure packages.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure that you have:

• PHP version 7.1.3 or higher installed.
• Composer installed – a dependency manager for PHP.
• Basic understanding of using the command-line interface (CLI).

Installation Steps

To demonstrate how to use Symfony Flex to install libraries, we will start with a simple example and gradually progress to more complex use cases.

Step 1 – Installing Symfony Composer Packages

First, you need Composer. If you don’t have it installed, download it from https://getcomposer.org/. With Composer in place, you can begin installing packages.

composer require symfony/flex

This command installs Symfony Flex into your project. Flex modifies Composer’s behavior, enabling automatic configuration of components when they are added.

Step 2 – Installing a Simple Library

Let’s start by adding a new library to our Symfony project. We’ll use the ‘maker-bundle’ as an example:

composer require symfony/maker-bundle

Immediately after running this command, Symfony Flex will look for a recipe corresponding to the ‘maker-bundle’ and if found, it will execute the recipe to configure the bundle for your application.

Once installed, you can confirm the installation of the library by bin/console list make command, which should now show a list of available ‘make’ commands.

Step 3 – Installing a Library with a Specific version

If you need a specific version of a library, you can specify the version number like this:

composer require symfony/maker-bundle:^1.15

Here, Flex will install version 1.15 of the maker-bundle, or the latest minor version compatible with 1.15 if it’s available.

Step 4 – Advanced Usage – Multiple Libraries and Versions

You can also install multiple libraries with specific versions at once:

composer require orm-pack logger-pack:1.1.* api-pack

This command installs the ‘orm-pack’, ‘logger-pack’ with version 1.1.*, and ‘api-pack’ libraries respectively. Symfony Flex will process each of these and install associated recipes.

Configuring Libraries without Recipes

Not all libraries come with a Symfony Flex recipe. Some libraries might need manual configuration.

In such cases, after installing the library using Composer, you will need to manually adjust your application’s configuration files to use the library.

Conclusion

Throughout this guide, we’ve seen how Symfony Flex can streamline the library installation process. By taking advantage of Symfony recipes, developers can incorporate and configure packages in their applications with ease. Remember that while Flex greatly assists with integration, understanding the manual configuration of libraries remains an important skill.