How to merge Zend Framework 2 module public directories

php, zend-framework2

Solution

There are 4 ways of handling this:

- Symlinking assets in the `public/` directory

- Copy-pasting assets from the modules to the `public/` directory

- Using a particular Virtual Host Configuration (or generally web-server configuration)

Use an asset-manager module, such as one of the following:

- AssetManager - backed by assetic - merges assets at runtime, has caching for production environments and filters for CSS/JS minification and LESS/SASS conversion, allows exposing of assets from directories in the modules themselves.

- zf2-assetic-module - backed by assetic - handles CSS/JS minification and LESS/SASS conversion at runtime

- BaconAssetLoader - exposes assets from modules by deploying them in the `public/` dir at deploy time

Problem

Some zf2 modules have public directories for distribution of resources such as js/css/images. What is best practice for making these resouces available to the applicaiton? I would like it so that these resources were automatically available through `http://mysite.com/[moduleName]/`. For example, `root/public/js/sitescript.js` --> `http:\\mysite.com\js\sitescript.js` `root/module/mymodule/public/js/modulescript.js` --> `http:\\mysite.com\mymodule\js\modulescript.js` `root/vendor/vendormodule/public/js/vendorscript.js` --> `http:\\mysite.com\vendormodule\js\vendorscript.js` Should these resources be copied to the root/public directory? Manual copying will be painful, and I doubt an automated build process to merge the directories would be very practial either. Perhaps there is some magic that can be worked with httpd.conf or .htaccess? Perhaps symlinks are the solution? But, symlinks are not straight forward to get going on a Windows platform, and would need to be created manually for each individual module.

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