Contributing to open source bundles from vendor directory?

Question

Ideal Situation

Often while working on a Symfony2 project I will spot something I want to change in one of my dependencies. If I could find a way to simply change it in vendor and then easily push the changes as a pull request then I would probably contribute more often (rather than overriding the part with a local child bundle).

The Problem

I can't change a vendor directory without composer freaking out on the next update. If I submit a pull request then it may take quite some time before I can actually use the code in vendors, which is actually a deterrent from contributing my new functionality.

How I do it now

The way I typically contribute to a bundle is to make a fork, put the fork in a barebones symfony standard-edition app, make the change and then submit a pull request.

Put fork in composer.json?

The only solution I can think of, is removing the packagist dependency of the bundle I am editing, and then including my fork with composer (as a package) from github. That way I get my code immediately and can still contribute.

Is this the only solution? How do you do it?

Any tips/advice for contributing to a bundle while working on a different project at the same time would be appreciated!

Answer 1

Nah... this is broken.

I've tried the official way to include a fork, here's an example (original:kitano, fork: jstoeffler) of the composer.json :

(For those who are in a hurry: THIS DOESNT WORK)

"repositories": [ //...     {         "type": "vcs",         "url": "https://github.com/jstoeffler/KitanoConnectionBundle",      }, //... ], 

It keeps using the original bundle. Don't know what the problem is, and I don't get how everything works, but here's how I successfully add a fork to a project.

"repositories": [ //...     {         "type": "package",         "package": {             "name": "kitano/connection-bundle",             "version": "dev-master",             "source": {                 "url": "https://github.com/jstoeffler/KitanoConnectionBundle.git",                 "type": "git",                 "reference": "master"             },             "autoload": {                 "classmap": [""]             }         }     }, //... ], 

Answer 2

[UPDATE: Answer Not Valid Anymore]

As pointed out in one of the comments, this answer is a couple years old and not correct anymore. See answers below for the correct way to proceed.

[Original answer below]

This is the approach recommended by Jordi Boggiano (@Seldaek), creator of composer. See from his talk at Symfony Live San Francisco earlier this year (at the 2 minutes mark): http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLo7mBDsRHu11ChvScWUE7MN1Qo5QVHQEz&feature=player_detailpage&v=P3NwF8RV1lY#t=120s