cebe/assetfree-yii2

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

cebe/assetfree-yii2 composer package

A composer package that allows you to install yii2 without composer-asset-plugin., _(*1)

How to use?

Just require cebe/assetfree-yii2 instead of yiisoft/yii2 in your composer.json., _(*2)

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., _(*3)

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., _(*4)

How does this work?

Magic: https://github.com/cebe/assetfree-yii2/blob/2.0.0/composer.json#L9-L14 :), _(*5)

This package claims to "provide" the required asset packages which are only available when composer-asset-plugin is installed. In reallity no asset packages are installed, so this is only useful in cases where you do not need them., _(*6)