Use Symfony 2 component in non-Symfony project?

Question

For getting XLIFF/2 support in PHP, in another answer, it was suggested to use the Symfony 2 Translation component.

So I downloaded it from Github into a directory ../vendor/ and naively tried to use it:

<?php

    require_once '../vendor/Symfony/Component/Translation/Translator.php';
    require_once '../vendor/Symfony/Component/Translation/MessageSelector.php';
    require_once '../vendor/Symfony/Component/Translation/Loader/ArrayLoader.php';

    use Symfony\Component\Translation\Translator;
    use Symfony\Component\Translation\MessageSelector;
    use Symfony\Component\Translation\Loader\ArrayLoader;

    $translator = new Translator('fr_FR', new MessageSelector());

This doesn’t work as other components would need to be loaded:

PHP Fatal error:  Interface 'Symfony\\Component\\Translation\\TranslatorInterface' not found in /home/ec2-user/layout/vendor/Symfony/Component/Translation/Translator.php on line 25

Now, I could manually add a require_once for every file, until all dependencies are met, but I’m not sure if that’s the proper approach.

How do I use a single Symfony 2 component in a non-Symfony project? Is that a bad idea?

Answer 1

Manage your dependencies with composer.

First create a composer.json file in your project folder :

{
    "require": {
        "symfony/translation": "2.4.*"
    }
}

Then download composer and run it :

wget http://getcomposer.org/composer.phar
php composer.phar install

You can now use your component by importing the composer autoloader :

<?php

    require_once('vendor/autoload.php');

    use Symfony\Component\Translation\Translator;
    use Symfony\Component\Translation\MessageSelector;
    use Symfony\Component\Translation\Loader\ArrayLoader;

    $translator = new Translator('fr_FR', new MessageSelector());
    $translator->setFallbackLocales(array('fr'));
    $translator->addLoader('array', new ArrayLoader());
    $translator->addResource('array', array(
        'Hello World!' => 'Bonjour',
    ), 'fr');

    echo $translator->trans('Hello World!')."\n";