README

A composer package that allows you to install yii2 without composer-asset-plugin.

How to use?

Just require laxity7/yii2-assets-free instead (or after) of yiisoft/yii2 in your composer.json.

Why?

Yii2 currently depends on Asset packages to make it really easy to create frontend applications as it directly provides Widgets and Javascript/CSS components out of the box. Therefore, the composer-asset-plugin is used which allows to manage frontend dependencies directly in composer.json.

Sometimes however, these frontend components are not needed, e.g. if you use Yii to create a Console Application, Background workers or a REST API. So if you do not want to install the composer-asset-plugin on your production servers because you do not need any asset functionality anyway you may use this package instead of requiring yiisoft/yii2 directly.

How does this work?

Magic in composer.json

This package claims to "provide" the required asset packages which are only available when composer-asset-plugin ist installed. In reallity no asset packages are installed, so this is only useful in cases where you do not need them.

What to do with assets?

For example, to use the Debug module just add to the config

'components' => [
    'assetManager' => [
        'bundles' => [
            'yii\web\JqueryAsset' => [
                'sourcePath' => null,
                'js' => [
                    '//code.jquery.com/jquery-3.4.0.min.js',
                ]
            ],
        ],
        // or like this
        //'assetMap'   => [
        //    'jquery.js' => '//code.jquery.com/jquery-3.4.0.min.js',
        //],
    ],
],