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Using Bower with Symfony

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Using Bower with Symfony

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:

1	$ npm install -g bower

After 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):

{
    "directory": "web/assets/vendor/"
}

Tip

If you’re using a front-end build system like Gulp or Grunt, then you can set the directory to whatever you want. Typically, you’ll use these tools to ultimately move all assets into the web/ directory.

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:

1	$ bower install --save bootstrap

This will install Bootstrap and its dependencies in web/assets/vendor/ (or whatever directory you configured in .bowerrc).

Including the Dependency in your Template¶

Now that the dependencies are installed, you can include bootstrap in your template like normal CSS/JS:

Twig

{# 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>

PHP

<!-- app/Resources/views/layout.html.php -->
<!doctype html>
<html>
    <head>
        {# ... #}

        <link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo $view['assets']->getUrl(
            '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:

1	$ git add web/assets/vendor

Why? 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.

This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.