Bootstrap is a well known and powerful front-end framework for fast prototyping, it uses LESS and it can be easily integrate in your Symfony applications with the help of assetic. In this post I'll show how to: Install bootstrap in you Symfony application, load it using assetic, and compile bootstrap LESS files with lessphp.

Using Composer, creating a new Symfony2 project is just a single command away. The just update the "composer.json" and run the install to get the other needed libraries (LESS and the Twitter Bootstrap). They help you set up some Assetic filters for LESS and provide a simple page to output the Bootstrap in your header.

Assetic is a PHP library for managing the deployment of your assets: JavaScript, CSS and other resources which will be requested by the browser. The library has been created by Kris Wallsmith from OpenSky, an e-shop where many of the active members of the PHP community work, or worked (see Jonathan Wage/Doctrine 1 and Bulat Shakirzyanov/Imagine.)

Giorgio compares it to the more traditional method (putting them in a public folder) and how Assetic gives you an advantage over this setup. The main feature of the tool is to bundle all of your assets into one file that is then sent to the browser and interpreted there reducing the need for HTTP calls to request multiple files. An example is included showing the creation of an asset collection and the output of the files all combined into one string.

Symfony Standard comes bundled with a great library called Assetic for Assets Management in PHP 5.3 (CSS, js, and even image optimization coming soon) developed by Kris Wallsmith. We will be using it to compress our CSS files, thus reducing the time required to download stylesheets in our Symfony2 projects.

The steps are pretty simple (especially if you're at all familiar with Symfony):

• Install the YUI Compressor
• Change the way you call your assets
• Edit your configuration file
• Dump your assets for production

You'll need to have an installation of Symfony2 already set up and running - there's no steps included on that setup.