Question

I’m new to Symfony2 and I have faced some simple problem but I’m not sure how to manage with it. I need to use one simple 3rd party class and I’m not sure where and how to store it in project structure. Should I store is a Service in my Bundle or maybe I should store it in vendors directory? And if I’ll store it in vendors isn’t it a bad practice to store there the libs that isn’t Symfony supported vendors?

Answer 1

Usually you include those in your project with Composer. I suggest you to take a look at packagist to look if there is a Composer package for your class, otherwise you can’t require it with composer.

Composer puts your classes in the vendor directory, you should put all ‘vendors’ (3th party libraries) there. Take a look on where to put them in that directory, so that the Composer autoloader can autoload it.

After that, it is recommend to create a bundle for that specific class. It is a best practise to create a service there. For instance, if your class is Foo you create a Acme\FooBundle which loads the Foo service:

// src/Acme/FooBundle/DependencyInjection/AcmeFooExtension.php
<?php

namespace Acme\FooBundle\DependencyInjection;

use Symfony\Component\Config\FileLocator;
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\ContainerBuilder;
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Loader\XmlFileLoader;
use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\DependencyInjection\Extension;

class AcmeFooExtension extends Extension
{
    /**
     * this method loads the Service Container services.
     */
    public function load(array $configs, ContainerBuilder $container)
    {
         $loader = new XmlFileLoader($container, new FileLocator(__DIR__.'/../Resources/config'));

         // load the src/Acme/FooBundle/Resources/config/services.xml file
         $loader->load('services.xml');
    }

<!-- src/Acme/FooBundle/Resources/config/services.xml -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

<container xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services/services-1.0.xsd">

    <services>
        <!-- Loads the \Foo class as a acme_foo.foo service -->
        <service id="acme_foo.foo"
            class="\Foo"
        ></service>
    </services>

</container>