February 21, 2019 Fabien Potencier

Symfony Flex is a recommended dependency of modern Symfony applications that improves your productivity by automating repetitive and boring tasks, like installing and automatically configuring bundles and other libraries.

Symfony Flex 1.2 has just been released with some useful new features!

Simpler update of recipes

Symfony Recipes define the instructions used by Symfony Flex to install and configure dependencies in your apps. We update recipes continuously to enable new features introduced by libraries or new configuration for a better experience. You don't need to apply these updated recipes to your application. But applying them can sometimes show you new features that you may want to use in your applications.

Symfony Flex already provides a sync-recipes command to install or reinstall recipes for the packages installed in an application. However, this command doesn't execute the recipe again if the recipe was already executed. And so, the updated version of a recipe is never applied to existing applications.

Symfony Flex 1.2 introduces the --force option to sync-recipes to unconditionally run all the recipes again for all packages. In practice, it means that Symfony will execute the latest recipe but you will lose any custom change that you made to the files affected by the recipes. The solution is to check the changes with git diff and apply/decline each recipe change:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 $ composer sync-recipes --force Symfony operations: 10 recipes (8967ada4e2fe4a57735c35d43dd14035) - Configuring symfony/flex: From github.com/symfony/recipes:master - Configuring symfony/framework-bundle: From github.com/symfony/recipes:master - Configuring doctrine/doctrine-bundle: From github.com/symfony/recipes:master - ... * Use git diff to inspect the changes. Not all of the changes will be relevant to your app: you now need to selectively add or revert them using e.g. a combination of git add -p and git checkout -p * Use git checkout . to revert the changes. New (untracked) files can be inspected using git clean --dry-run Add the new files you want to keep using git add then delete the rest using git clean --force

Improved the handling of ``.env`` files

If you created your Symfony application after December 2018 or if you have updated the recipes with sync-recipes --force recently, you'll see an important change related to the .env* config files.

These files are now always loaded, even if you set an APP_ENV=prod environment variable. The purpose is for the .env file to define default values that you can override with real environment values or by creating a .env.local file.

If you want to avoid parsing the .env* files on every request, Symfony Flex 1.2 includes a new dump-env command that compiles the contents of the .env* files into a PHP-optimized file called .env.local.php :

1 2 3 $ composer dump-env prod Successfully dumped .env files in .env.local.php

That file is then automatically read by the config/bootstrap.php file. And though this command is optional, it may be a good idea to run it during your deployment workflow to improve the application performance (same as you do with other commands such as composer dump-autoload -o ).

Other improvements

Auto-installing multiple bundles

Currently, any package with a symfony-bundle type in its composer.json file is enabled as a Symfony bundle when installing it, even if it doesn't have a Symfony Flex recipe defined for it.

Symfony Flex 1.2 now enables all the bundles found in the autoload configuration of the composer.json file, not only the first one.

Conflicting Recipes

Recipes can now include a conflict key in their manifests to define the packages and versions which are not compatible with it. If a conflict is found when installing a recipe, Symfony Flex displays a message saying that a recipe installation was skipped and the reason for it: