Now Exposed: composer.json & package.json for every Tutorial

We're lucky to get a lot of user feedback at SymfonyCasts. One of the most common ones sounds a bit like this:

Hey! Could you post the date that a tutorial was recorded? I want to make sure it's up to date.

I totally get this: one of the first things I do when I look at a blog post or Stack Overflow is: how old is this?

But for tutorials, the date doesn't tell the full story: some topics are virtually timeless (e.g. the entire object-oriented series) while other technologies change quickly.

A better question is:

What versions of the technology does this tutorial teach?

Or:

What version of Symfony is this built on?

To answer these, starting today, every tutorial (except for a few ancient ones) now publishes their full composer.json and package.json (if it has one) file contents right on the main tutorial page under a button that highlights a main library that's being taught. If you open the contents, you can see the exact, locked version of each library from the final code in the tutorial.

I already love this feature. But we also realized that even it can sometimes be misleading. For example, our Doctrine Queries Tutorial is built on an old version of Symfony (version 2!), but the logic of making queries in Doctrine hasn't changed. In this case, we give you some extra context:

This course is built on Symfony 2, but most of the concepts apply just fine to newer versions of Symfony. If you have questions, let us know :).

This gives you the information that this uses an old version of Symfony, but the confidence to know that what we want you to learn from this course is still relevant.

Let us know how you like the feature and if we can offer any other info to make the tutorials more useful! Huge thanks to Victor for his work, re-work and re-work again to make this feature really shine.

❤️ Ryan