How to Manage Front-end Dependencies in PHP Packages

In this era of decoupling, lots of features are seperated into smaller libraries. If your bundle uses a PHP library, adding it to composer.json is quite easy. But what about frontend dependencies, like jQuery?

Well, that’s easy too!

Meet Bower

Bower is a simple package manager for web dependencies, just like what Composer is doing for PHP.

To install it, make sure you have NodeJS and NPM installed and then install the bower package:

$ npm install -g bower

For information about using Bower in Symfony, read the official Symfony docs.

How to use Bower in a PHP Project?

Let’s assume someone installs your bundle into their project. They would do this using Composer. So when running bower install in the Symfony project, it isn’t aware of the bower.json file somewhere hidden in the vendor directory.

To solve this problem, you can create a virtual bower package for your PHP package. This virtual package will just contain a bower.json file and will have the same versions as the Composer package of the bundle. When installing a bundle, users can add the virtual package as dependency in their bower.json. After that, when running bower install, Bower recognizes the new requirement in the application’s bower.json file and resolves/installs all depedencies.

“So I need to maintain 2 repositories?”, you would say. Good news: You don’t have to, continue reading!

Create a bower.json File for your Bundle

First things first, let’s make a bower.json file by running the init command:

$ bower init

Your bower.json file looks something like this:

    "name": "...",
    "version": "...",
    "authors": ["..."],
    "keywords": ["..."],
    "license": "MIT",
    "ignore": [

The ignore option might be new to you. This is caused by the differences between JS and PHP development. In JS, most of the source directories aren’t used, only a minified file is used. Bower wants to be nice and tries to remove as much unneeded files and directories as possible. So, after downloading the dependency, it removes everything that matches the glob patterns in the ignore option.

Imagine what happends if we only have one ignore pattern: ["*"]: Everything will be ignored. Isn’t that exactly what we want for the bundle? We can add the bower.json file in the PHP repository and just let it ignore all files in there.

Registering the packages

Now you can register both packages:

  • Register your repository as a Composer PHP package (your bundle)
  • Register the same repository as a Bower package (the frontend dependencies)

Assume your bundle is called acme/blog-bundle, your Bower package might be called acme-blog-bundle. Installation now consists of 2 steps:

$ composer require acme/blog-bundle
$ bower install --save acme-blog-bundle

Extra: Being open for people that don’t use Bower

The current set-up requires people to use Bower. Forcing people to use new tools isn’t good, especially if it’s about a Node dependency (although there is a PHP port of Bower).

To solve this problem, commit the front-end dependencies in the bundle. This means that people always get a working bundle. If they want to have the latest versions of their frontend dependencies, they could add the virtual package in their Bower dependencies, as explained above.

But this means a bundle has to support 2 different paths for the dependencies:

  • bundles/acmeblog/vendor when Bower isn’t used in the project
  • bower_packages (or any other configured URL) when the user used the virtual Bower package

In the CmfTreeBrowserBundle, we solved this problem by having a scripts.html.twig template like this:

{# CmfTreeBrowserBundle/Resources/views/Base/scripts.html.twig #}
<script src="{{ asset(assetsBasePath ~ '/jquery/dist/jquery.min.js') }}">

You see the assetsBasePath variable in front of the path, this can be set to the path to the frontend dependencies. The main template file now looks like:

{# CmfTreeBrowserBundle/Resources/views/Base/tree.html.twig #}
{% include 'CmfTreeBrowserBundle:Base:scripts.html.twig' with {
    assetsBasePath: 'bundles/cmftreebrowser/vendor'
} %}

This will retrieve the files installed with the bundle. When a user uses Bower, they override this file with the new base path:

{# app/Resources/views/CmfTreeBrowserBundle/Base/tree.html.twig #}
{% include 'CmfTreeBrowserBundle:Base:scripts.html.twig' with {
    assetsBasePath: 'bower_packages'
} %}

This will pick the scripts from /web/bower_packages/jquery/dist/jquery.min.js and you’re ready to upgrade jQuery whenever you want in your app!