Extending Bolt / Project specific modifications

Note: You are currently reading the documentation for Bolt 4.0. Looking for the documentation for Bolt 5.2 instead?

If you are working on a Bolt project, you can add your own code to create custom functionalities. This means that if you're working on a project that requires custom functionality, you are not required to create an extension. You can incorporate your code in the Project, since Bolt is a standard Symfony application.

You can do this by adding your custom code to the src/ folder in your project. After initially setting up a new project, it looks like this:

src/
├── Entity/
└── Kernel.php

The Kernel.php is Bolt's kernel, which extends Symfony's kernel. The src/ folder itself is configured in config/services.yaml to make App\ classes available as services. This includes full Autowiring and Dependency Injection for your own classes. The Entity folder is configured for Doctrine Entity mappings.

For example, to make a very basic extension, simply create a new file called src/Foobar.php with the following contents:

<?php

namespace App;

use Bolt\Extension\BaseExtension;

class Foobar extends BaseExtension
{
    public function getName(): string
    {
        return "A very simple extension";
    }

    public function initialize(): void
    {
        dump('it works!');
    }
}

Note: The name of the PHP class and the filename should match. Like class Foobar and Foobar.php in the example above. It's also case sensitive, so don't mix up "Foobar" and "FooBar".

Now, if you run the following, you should see the new extension listed in your terminal:

$ bin/console extensions:list

 Currently installed extensions:
 --------------------------------------- -----------------------------------
  Class                                   Extension name
 --------------------------------------- -----------------------------------
  App\Foobar                              A very simple extension
  BobdenOtter\WeatherWidget\Extension     Dashboard Weather Widget
  Bolt\NewsWidget\Extension               Dashboard News Widget
 --------------------------------------- -----------------------------------

If you open the project in a browser window, you'll see there's a dump statement (under the little crosshair icon) in the Debug Toolbar, saying "It works!".

See the page on BaseExtension for more details on how it works.