Using Bower with Symfony
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Using Bower with Symfony
Symfony and all its packages are perfectly managed by Composer. Bower is a dependency management tool for front-end dependencies, like Bootstrap or jQuery. As Symfony is purely a back-end framework, it can't help you much with Bower. Fortunately, it is very easy to use!
Installing Bower
Bower is built on top of Node.js. Make sure you have that installed and then run:
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$ npm install -g bowerAfter this command has finished, run bower in your terminal to find out if
it's installed correctly.
Tip
If you don't want to have NodeJS on your computer, you can also use
BowerPHP (an unofficial PHP port of Bower). Beware that this is currently
in beta status. If you're using BowerPHP, use bowerphp instead of
bower in the examples.
Configuring Bower in your Project
Normally, Bower downloads everything into a bower_components/ directory. In
Symfony, only files in the web/ directory are publicly accessible, so you
need to configure Bower to download things there instead. To do that, just
create a .bowerrc file with a new destination (like web/assets/vendor):
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{
"directory": "web/assets/vendor/"
}An Example: Installing Bootstrap
Believe it or not, but you're now ready to use Bower in your Symfony application. As an example, you'll now install Bootstrap in your project and include it in your layout.
Installing the Dependency
To create a bower.json file, just run bower init. Now you're ready to
start adding things to your project. For example, to add Bootstrap to your
bower.json and download it, just run:
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$ bower install --save bootstrapThis will install Bootstrap and its dependencies in web/assets/vendor/ (or
whatever directory you configured in .bowerrc).
See also
For more details on how to use Bower, check out Bower documentation.
Including the Dependency in your Template
Now that the dependencies are installed, you can include bootstrap in your template like normal CSS/JS:
- Twig
- PHP
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{# app/Resources/views/layout.html.twig #}
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
{# ... #}
<link rel="stylesheet"
href="{{ asset('assets/vendor/bootstrap/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css') }}">
</head>
{# ... #}
</html>Great job! Your site is now using Bootstrap. You can now easily upgrade bootstrap to the latest version and manage other front-end dependencies too.
Should I Git Ignore or Commit Bower Assets?
Currently, you should probably commit the assets downloaded by Bower instead
of adding the directory (e.g. web/assets/vendor) to your .gitignore
file:
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$ git add web/assets/vendorWhy? Unlike Composer, Bower currently does not have a "lock" feature, which
means that there's no guarantee that running bower install on a different
server will give you the exact assets that you have on other machines.
For more details, read the article Checking in front-end dependencies.
But, it's very possible that Bower will add a lock feature in the future (e.g. bower/bower#1748).
If you don't care too much about having exact the same versions, you can only
commit the bower.json file. Running bower install will give you the
latest versions within the specified version range of each package in
bower.json. Using strict version constraints (e.g. 1.10.*) is often
enough to ensure only bringing in compatible versions.
