Requiring bundles with Symfony Flex

Symfony Flex as the new workflow to create Symfony application is awesome. It is quite easy to add or remove bundles by

composer req cli
# or
composer req symfony/console

Reciepes are responsible to create a pre configuration for bundles to register, configuration to set, env variables ... You can create your own reciepes by commiting to one of the repositories (contributors or main)

As a maintainer of the Symfony CMF i currently try to build our reciepes and a i faced a problem, that has been there before, but gets visible on our and depending bundles now:

Problematic bundle configuration

As the bundles i require (and their dependencies) are registered directly, errors in configuration will be visible on demand as the process of requiring is closed by a make cache-warmup in most cases. Which errors can occur?

general missing dependencies
enabling of optional features, which require extra dependencies
configurations, which are required but are not served by a reciepe as defaults

Those issues can occur on the required bundle itself or on a dependency in the required bundle.

I could adjust the configuration and registered bundles manually, but i lost the required bundle in my composer process, as composer resets its changes on error. and i am unsure if flex would overwrite manual changes on a second composer req a/b call.

Caused by those issues and lots of tries to fix them or tries to think about them i created several issues on several symfony repositories. Those issues are no critics on flex. I just try to understand it and wanna make it stable.

But what about those issues in the bundles i require?

Clean bundles

Is it fair to say: I demand clean bundles.

a composer require bundle will go through without any manual configuration on an empty symfony application (including registering bundle)
default configuration of a bundle does not require more dependencies, then defined in require section of the composer.json
if a configuration is required a reciepe exists with default values
dependencies for optional features are not required directly, but a clear advice existes how to get them (required bundles, configuration

I mean, that sounds valid and should be tested in all cases, but i personaly have a problem with a bundle i created.

Why now?

The issues are more visible now as the bundles are registered directly via flex. But we would see same behavior on older symfony apps, when we would register bundles directly. But here the user is led through the installation process by a documentation. And that hides several issues. As a bundle developer i must admit, that the issues are also hidden for us. Our tests got the support of require-dev in composer.json. So all dependencies are available and the configuration is set to the values we whant it. Mostly we have got a sandbox with all the dependencies we need. There it works fine. But the user is the one, who gets the error when installing our bundles (for the first time). So we should test our bundles to get the same experiences a new user would have. I created a little script to bootstrap a tiny symfony app and require each of our bundles on it. Doing so i can fetch the errors on an make cache-warmup. If somebody likes the script i would add it i would add it to our testing component.

So what about developing clean bundles and have more fun working with Symfony Flex?

Question

Can damand from a symfony bundle to be installable without manual intervention with default/empy configuration? If yes, how should we bundle devs proof it?

ElectricMaxxx/symfony_flex_bundles.md