How do you register bundles in Symfony2.1 designed for older versions of Symfony?

Question

I am attempting to use they EntityAudit extension for Doctrine2 in my Symfony2.1 app.

I'm very new to this, and I've just started realizing how many "correct" methods there have been for installing new bundles for Symfony over the years. Some sort of "Deps" file used to exist but does no longer? When installing Symfony, "using Composer" was an option -- but purely an option, it seemed. Now I'm starting to think that's not true.

In EntityAudit's instructions it refers to "Autoload", and based on other things, I'm apparently supposed to modify the registerNamespaces array in my Autoload.php. Except I don't have that. So I found this link where the guy indicates Symfony2.1 doesn't do that anymore in favor of using Composer.

I don't really know how to use Composer in this case though. I don't really know how to use it at all, actually, but I seem to have bumbled through doing 1 or 2 basic things in it -- "updating" itself and "installing" .. vendors? Anyway, I can find no instructions general enough to be adapted for this need. Thanks in advance for any help!

Answer 1

The deps file is used in 2.0 to manage dependencies. The 2.1 version uses the much better Composer dependency management tool.

Install with composer

First you'll need some basix about composer. For instance, read this article: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/easy-package-management-with-composer/

Before you can use composer to install a bundle you should look for a Packagist package of that bundle. For the SimpleThings\EntityAuditBundle you should look for a simplethings/entity-audit-bundle package and it does exists: https://packagist.org/packages/simplethings/entity-audit-bundle

SIDENOTE

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 usefull site to begin searching for bundles.

Now you have the package name, you should determine the version you want to use. As this is a not-finished bundle we can use the latest version by using the dev-master version. But it could be possible that a dev-master version is for Symfony2.2 and we should use another version if we use Symfony2.1, this should be in the README file (in the Package, which you can view on Github or KnpBundles). If it isn't in the README, you can use the version you want. An example of the note about version can be found in the StofDoctrineExtensionsBundle.

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

1. Add it to the composer.json file:

   {
       ...,
       "require": {
           ...,
           "simplethings/entity-audit-bundle": "dev-master"
       }
   }
   

2. Update the dependency

   $ php composer.phar update simplethings/entity-audit-bundle
   

   or update all dependencies

   $ php composer.phar update
   

Or you can do this is one command:

1. Run this command (which includes the package in the composer.json and updates the package)

   $ php composer.phar require simplethings/entity-audit-bundle:dev-master
   

Now the bundle is installed into our Symfony project (in vendor/simpletings/) and the autoloader recognises this bundle. The only thing we need to do now is registering the bundle in the AppKernel:

// app/AppKernel.php

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

    public function registerBundles()
    {
        $bundles = array(
            ...,
            new SimpleThings\EntityAudit\SimpleThingsEntityAuditBundle(),
        );

        // ...
    }
}