Upgrade Flex on your Symfony projects

As announced at the end of September, Symfony Flex is Going Serverless.

If you have a project using Symfony 4+ full-stack framework, there is a high chance that it is using Symfony Flex. Symfony Flex automatically configures packages when you install or upgrade them via official or contributed recipes. The way we serve the recipes is changing, and you need to upgrade the symfony/flex package to take advantage of this change.

First, check that you are using Flex using this command:

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$ composer show symfony/flex

If none of your projects is using Flex, you can get back to work.

But if the versions entry is showing a version that is less than v1.17.1, then, please keep reading, this blog post is for you.

With older versions than v1.17, Flex is getting the recipes from the Flex server. This is currently a single point of failure as this server is managed by Symfony with limited resources. As of v1.17, we switched to use Github to serve recipes, which makes us confident that the SLA can only be better. On top of that, we are now serving static files instead of dynamic ones, which should make downloading the recipes a bit faster too.

The current Flex server will be retired at some point, so you need to upgrade Flex to benefit from the new setup. Upgrading the symfony/flex package by running the following command is enough:

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$ composer update symfony/flex --no-plugins --no-scripts

We have not decided yet when we will shut down the current Flex server, but please upgrade at your earlier convenience to help us move forward faster.