How to run multiple bower.json files (inside composer dependencies)? - composer-php

Question

I have a PHP project, that uses composer for it's PHP dependencies and bower for it's front end dependencies. So basically I have a directory structure that looks something like this (a simplified version obviously):
/app
/bower_components
/public
/vendor
/foo
/bar
/src
bower.json
composer.json
bower.json
composer.json
gulpfile.js
As you can see, the php dependency has some front end dependencies of it's own, that are also managed with bower. However, when I run bower install from the root of my app, the bower file from inside my foo/bar dependency is ignored.
I do not want to build my front-end dependencies inside foo/bar in advance and just include those in my app using gulp, because foo/bar may have overlapping dependencies with my app (like jQuery or Bootstrap or something) and I obviously do not want to include those twice. And I also would prefer bower throwing an error when there are version conflicts for overlapping dependencies, rather then having to find out the hard way.
Ideally all my front end dependencies would end up in my root bower_components directory, both those from my app's bower.json, as well as those from vendor/foo/bar/bower.json. This way I can have gulp compile all those into a single (or probably a few) .js and .css file.
So the question is, is that possible? Can I have bower look at other bower.json files inside sub directories? Or is there a recommended way to automatically merge multiple bower.json files before bower is ran?
I have spent the last hour scouring the web for a good solution to this problem, but I can't seem to come up with anything. (If you know of a good blog post or resource on this topic, please do share!) All google gives me are some basic bower tutorials, that are not very helpful here. Am I really the first one to run into this problem, or is there something fundamentally wrong in the way I am trying to tackle the issue at hand?

Answer 1

One way to tackle this (and a way Symfony CMF uses now) is to create bower packages for your PHP dependencies. This means you create a front-end bower package from your bundle, the package only contains the bower.json file with the dependencies.
Now, in your application's bower.json file, you can specify these "virtual" bower packages as requirements and run bower install. For instance:
{
"dependencies": {
"php-foobar": "^1.3"
}
}

Answer 2

The composer plugins composer-extra-assets and composer-assets-plugin allow adding bower dependencies to composer.json.
composer-assets-plugin is implemented in pure php and turns bower packages into composer packages.
composer-extra-assets calls the "real" bower behind the scenes. It is installed (including the required nodejs) automatically though if you don't have it on your system.
Disclaimer: I'm the author of composer-extra-assets.