How to Install 3rd Party Bundles

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

A) Add Composer Dependencies

Dependencies are managed with Composer, so if Composer is new to you, learn some basics in their documentation. This involves two steps:

1) Find out the Name of the Bundle on Packagist

The README for a bundle (e.g. FOSUserBundle) usually tells you its name (e.g. friendsofsymfony/user-bundle). If it doesn't, you can search for the bundle on the Packagist.org site.

Tip

Looking for bundles? Try searching for symfony-bundle topic on GitHub.

2) Install the Bundle via Composer

Now that you know the package name, you can install it via Composer:

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        $ composer require friendsofsymfony/user-bundle
    

This will choose the best version for your project, add it to composer.json and download its code into the vendor/ directory. If you need a specific version, include it as the second argument of the composer require command:

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        $ composer require friendsofsymfony/user-bundle "~2.0"
    

B) Enable the Bundle

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

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        // app/AppKernel.php

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

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

        // ...
    }
}
    

In a few rare cases, you may want a bundle to be only enabled in the development environment. For example, the DoctrineFixturesBundle helps to load dummy data - something you probably only want to do while developing. To only load this bundle in the dev and test environments, register the bundle in this way:

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        // app/AppKernel.php

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

    public function registerBundles()
    {
        $bundles = array(
            // ...
        );

        if (in_array($this->getEnvironment(), array('dev', 'test'))) {
            $bundles[] = new Doctrine\Bundle\FixturesBundle\DoctrineFixturesBundle();
        }

        // ...
    }
}
    

C) Configure the Bundle

It's pretty common for a bundle to need some additional setup or configuration in app/config/config.yml. The bundle's documentation will tell you about the configuration, but you can also get a reference of the bundle's configuration via the config:dump-reference command:

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        $ app/console config:dump-reference AsseticBundle
    

Instead of the full bundle name, you can also pass the short name used as the root of the bundle's configuration:

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        $ app/console config:dump-reference assetic
    

The output will look like this:

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        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 to do next. Have fun!

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

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