使用公共资产为Composer创建PHP库

Question

I'm creating a Template library for a client. The goal of the library is to provide a standardized shell for all the websites the company owns. Other developers should be able to import the library with Composer and create a base template with a few lines of code, eg:

$Template = new Template;
$Template->setContent('Hello world!');
$Template->render();

This will render the content inside the standardized shell. This is a simplified example, the library provides much more functionality such as standardized sliders, menu's etc...

This library depends on Twig, but it also depends on a bunch of front-end assets; like custom images, javascripts, css and 3rd party stuff like Jquery and Bootstrap CSS. Those assets are stored in the /assets/ folder.

After installing the library with Composer, everything is stored in the /vendors/ folder, which is in the root of the website. But the /assets/ folder needs to be in the /public_html/ to be accessible.

The solution for now: just copy the /assets/ folder to the /public_html/. But I'm sure there are more repositories depending on front-end assets, what is the most common way to make those assets available in /public_html/?

Answer 1

The closes thing which comes into my mind is the Symfony2 Bundle system. Each bundle you define must be registered in the AppKernel. If the bundle contains assets that will be linked or copied under the /web/bundles/short_bundle_name/ folder.

So to be able to follow up your dependencies' assets you will need some kind of registry mechanism, so you can register which libs has assets what needs to be copied over / linked under the public_html folder.

Also consider using assetic to process your plain assets (merge, rewrite and other filters) with cache-busting capabilities.

Answer 2

You can use a combination of Composer for backend dependencies and Bower for your front end, and Grunt to move and process files.

with Composer you add the following to your composer.json

"scripts": {
    "post-install-cmd": [
        "bower install",
        "grunt"
    ],
    "post-update-cmd": [
        "bower install",
        "grunt"
    ]
}

And then you have you basic Bower script bowser.json

{
    "name": "my/project",
    "dependencies": {
        "jquery": "*",
        "bootstrap": "*"
    }
}

And then you have you basic Grunt script gruntfile.js where you could use this ( https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-contrib-copy ) like so.

copy: {
  main: {
    expand: true,
    src: 'src/*',
    dest: 'dest/',
  },
},

Now you just have to run your composer commands to get all of your files installed or updated.

Note: you don't need to use Bower if all of your assets are in Composer