How to install 3rd party Bundles

Most bundles provide their own installation instructions. However, the basic steps for installing a bundle are the same.

Add Composer Dependencies

Starting from Symfony 2.1, dependencies are managed with Composer. It’s a good idea to learn some basics of Composer in their documentation.

Before you can use composer to install a bundle, you should look for a Packagist package of that bundle. For example, if you search for the popular FOSUserBundle you will find a packaged called friendsofsymfony/user-bundle.

Nota

Packagist is the main archive for Composer. If you are searching for a bundle, the best thing you can do is check out KnpBundles, it is the unofficial achive of Symfony Bundles. If a bundle contains a README file, it is displayed there and if it has a Packagist package it shows a link to the package. It’s a really useful site to begin searching for bundles.

Now that you have the package name, you should determine the version you want to use. Usually different versions of a bundle correspond to a particular version of Symfony. This information should be in the README file. If it isn’t, you can use the version you want. If you choose an incompatible version, Composer will throw dependency errors when you try to install. If this happens, you can try a different version.

In the case of the FOSUserBundle, the README file has a caution that version 1.2.0 must be used for Symfony 2.0 and 1.3+ for Symfony 2.1+. Packagist displays example require statements for all existing versions of a package. The current development version of FOSUserBundle is "friendsofsymfony/user-bundle": "2.0.*@dev".

Now you can add the bundle to your composer.json file and update the dependencies. You can do this manually:

1. Add it to the composer.json file:

   {
       ...,
       "require": {
           ...,
           "friendsofsymfony/user-bundle": "2.0.*@dev"
       }
   }

2. Update the dependency:

   $ php composer.phar update friendsofsymfony/user-bundle
   

   or update all dependencies

   $ php composer.phar update
   

Or you can do this in one command:

$ php composer.phar require friendsofsymfony/user-bundle:2.0.*@dev

Enable the Bundle

At this point, the bundle is installed in your Symfony project (in vendor/friendsofsymfony/) and the autoloader recognizes its classes. The only thing you need to do now is register the bundle in AppKernel:

// app/AppKernel.php

// ...
class AppKernel extends Kernel
{
    // ...

    public function registerBundles()
    {
        $bundles = array(
            // ...,
            new FOS\UserBundle\FOSUserBundle(),
        );

        // ...
    }
}

Configure the Bundle

Usually a bundle requires some configuration to be added to app’s app/config/config.yml file. The bundle’s documentation will likely describe that configuration. But you can also get a reference of the bundle’s config via the config:dump-reference command.

For instance, in order to look the reference of the assetic config you can use this:

$ app/console config:dump-reference AsseticBundle

or this:

$ app/console config:dump-reference assetic

The output will look like this:

assetic:
    debug:                %kernel.debug%
    use_controller:
        enabled:              %kernel.debug%
        profiler:             false
    read_from:            %kernel.root_dir%/../web
    write_to:             %assetic.read_from%
    java:                 /usr/bin/java
    node:                 /usr/local/bin/node
    node_paths:           []
    # ...

Other Setup

At this point, check the README file of your brand new bundle to see what do to next.