Symfony bundles: providing services and exposing resources

When you look at the source code of the Symfony framework, it becomes clear that bundles play two distinct and very different roles: in the first place a bundle is a service container extension: it offers ways to add, modify or remove service definitions and parameters, optionally by means of bundle configuration. This role is represented by the following methods of BundleInterface:

namespace Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Bundle;

interface BundleInterface extends ContainerAwareInterface
{
    /** Boots the Bundle. */
    public function boot();

    /** Shutdowns the Bundle. */
    public function shutdown();

    /** Builds the bundle. */
    public function build(ContainerBuilder $container);

    /** Returns the container extension that should be implicitly loaded. */
    public function getContainerExtension();

    ...
}

The second role of a bundle is that of a resource provider. When a bundle is registered in the application kernel, it automatically starts to expose all kinds of resources to the application. Think of routing files, controllers, entities, templates, translation files, etc.