In this recent post to the SitePoint PHP blog Nicola Pietroluongo looks at a newer tool in the PHP ecosystem that builds on to of the already widely popular Composer to expand packages outside of just the PHP code - Puli.

Puli is a new toolkit built on top of [Composer](https://getcomposer.org) that helps to manage and exchange resources like configuration files, images, CSS files, translation catalogs, and others. These are, you’ll agree, often difficult to maintain and share across projects.

The article starts with a brief overview of how it works and where it connects in with Composer, pulling in other dependencies as defined in a puli.json file. It then walks you through the creation of a simple package - installing the Puli CLI tool, building out the project file/folder structure and mapping resources/assets into the bundle. Finally they show how to install a demo package they've created, how the project maps in to the application and the pieces that make it up. The post ends with a look at the "resource discovery" feature Puli also includes making it easier to pull in configuration options without having to manually define them.

Bernhard Schussek has written up a new post to the Web Mozarts blog talking about resource discovery with Puli. Puli is a management tool for the non-PHP files in your applications (CSS, Javascript, YAML, etc). In this post he talks about the use of the discovery component and its use of resource binding.

Many libraries support configuration code, translations, HTML themes or other content in files of a specific format. The Doctrine ORM, for example, is able to load entity mappings from special XML files. When setting up Doctrine, we need to pass the location of the *.dcm.xml file to Doctrine’s XmlDriver. That’s easy as long as we do it ourselves, but what if someone else uses our package? How will they find our file? What if multiple packages provide *.dcm.xml files? How do we find all these files? We need to remove the appropriate setup code after removing a package [and] we need to adapt the setup code after installing a new package. Multiply this effort for every other library that uses user-provided files and you end up with a lot of configuration effort. Let’s see how Puli helps us to fix this.

He talks about the concept of package roles in the tool, breaking them down in resources and providers. He then shows how Puli makes it possible to discover resources by defining a type via Puli and the code for the discovery process. He then binds the XML configuration definition and executes a "find" to ensure it's configured correctly. Finally, he shows the process to use Puli in this Doctrine example allowing it to locate and use the XML mappings dynamically via a custom driver.

Bernhard Schussek has announced a tool for handling resources in a more Composer-inspired way: Puli. Puli is described as a tool that "manages files, directories and other resources in a filesystem-like repository".

Unfortunately, sharing your work gets a lot harder when you leave PHP code and enter the land of configuration files, images, CSS files, translation catalogs - in short, any file that is not PHP. For brevity, I'll call these files resources here. Using resources located in Composer packages is quite tedious: You need to know exactly where the package is installed and where the resource is located in the package. That's a lot of juggling with absolute and relative file system paths and prone to error.

[...] One and a half years ago I talked about this problem with PHP-FIG. I wrote a blog post about The Power of Uniform Resource Location in PHP. Many people joined the discussion. The understanding of the problem and its solution got riper as we spoke. Today, I am glad to present to you the first (and probably last) alpha version of Puli, a framework-agnostic resource manager for PHP.

He walks through the basics of the tool - how it manages the various resources, what the configuration looks like and how it can directly be integrated with Composer. He also points to a Twig extension that allows for Puli integration via paths in your templates. There's also a Symfony bridge that lets you use it in your YAML configuration files.