Upgrading to Symfony 4.4

To upgrade from Symfony 4.3 to 4.4 - that's a "minor" version upgrade - we need to change the extra.symfony.require value to 4.4.* - done! - and update each Symfony package version to that same value.

Updating Versions of Individual Symfony Packages

Let's get to work! I'll start with symfony/asset: change it to 4.4.*. Copy that and start repeating it:

I will skip a few packages that start with symfony/ because they are not part of the main Symfony repository - like symfony/flex:

These follow their own release schedules... so they usually have a version that's very different than everything else.

All "packs" - those are the, sort of, "fake" packages that just require other packages for convenience - are another example:

These usually allow pretty much any version of the libraries inside of them - so any Symfony packages will update correctly. If you want more control over the versions, remember that you can run:

composer unpack symfony/orm-pack

When you do that, Flex will remove this line and replace it with the individual packages so you can manage their versions. That's not required, but also not a bad idea.

WebpackEncoreBundle is another example of a package that isn't part of the main repository - you can see that its version is totally different:

Don't forget to also check the require-dev section: there are a bunch here:

Including symfony/debug-bundle, which has a funny-looking version because I unpacked it from a debug-pack in one of our courses. And both MakerBundle and MonologBundle are not in the main repository:

If you're not sure, you can search Packagist.org for symfony/symfony. That package lists all of the packages that make up this "main" repository I keep talking about.

Update phpunit-bridge, leave the profile-pack version and update var-dumper:

Perfect! We have 4.4.* everywhere up here and 4.4.* for extra.symfony.require so that everything matches and we get that performance boost in Composer.

Let's do this! Find your terminal and run:

sed -i 's/"4.3.*"/"4.4.*"/g' ./composer.json
sed -i 's/"^4.0"/"4.4.*"/g' ./composer.json
sed -i 's/"^3.3|^4.0"/"4.4.*"/g' ./composer.json

composer update "symfony/*"

And... yea! It's upgrading the last few libraries that were previously locked to 4.3. Congratulations! You just upgraded all Symfony packages to 4.4.

Fixing some require-dev Packages

Before we move on, I noticed a small problem in composer.json: the symfony/dotenv package is in my require-dev section:

When we put something in require-dev, we're saying:

This package is not needed when I run my code on production.

It was true that when Symfony 4.0 was released, the DotEnv component was used in the development environment only - as a way to help set environment variables more easily. That's not true anymore: Symfony apps now always load the .env files.

The symfony/monolog-bundle package - which gives us the logger service - should also live under require - along with its supporting package: easy-log-handler:

Logging is something we always want.

Let's fix these. Copy the symfony/dotenv package name, find your terminal, and remove these three packages:

composer remove --dev symfony/dotenv symfony/monolog-bundle easycorp/easy-log-handler

An easy way to move a package from require-dev to require and make sure that Composer notices, is to remove the package and re-add it.

When we do that... our code explodes! No problem: our app totally needs the DotEnv component... so it's temporarily freaking out. You'll also notice that, if you run:

git status

Removing these packages also removed their recipes. Re-add the libraries by using that same command, but replacing remove with require and getting rid of the --dev flag:

composer require symfony/dotenv symfony/monolog-bundle easycorp/easy-log-handler

This should add those back under the require section - yep, here is one - and it will reinstall the latest version of their recipes... which means that the recipe could be slightly newer than the one we had before:

This is... accidentally... the first example of upgrading a recipe. Run:

git status

Cool. Should we commit all of these changes? Not so fast. When a recipe is updated, you need to selectively add each change. Let's learn how next.