How to interpret suggestions when installing CakePHP via Composer? - cakephp

Question

When I try installing with command line:
composer self-update && composer create-project --prefer-dist cakephp/app my_app_name
I keep getting this message, which I didnt use to have, now which one is required, which one is not, do I have to download manually everytime?
cakephp/app suggests installing markstory/asset_compress (An asset compression plugin which provides file concatenation and a flexible filter system for preprocessing and minification.)
cakephp/app suggests installing dereuromark/cakephp-ide-helper (After baking your code, this keeps your annotations in sync with the code evolving from there on for maximum IDE and PHPStan compatibility.)
cakephp/app suggests installing phpunit/phpunit (Allows automated tests to be run without system-wide install.)
cakephp/cakephp suggests installing lib-ICU (The intl PHP library, to use Text::transliterate() or Text::slug())
symfony/console suggests installing symfony/event-dispatcher ()
symfony/console suggests installing symfony/lock ()
symfony/console suggests installing psr/log-implementation (For using the console logger)
m1/env suggests installing m1/vars (For loading of configs)
asm89/twig-cache-extension suggests installing psr/cache-implementation (To make use of PSR-6 cache implementation via PsrCacheAdapter.)
aptoma/twig-markdown suggests installing michelf/php-markdown (Original Markdown engine with MarkdownExtra.)
aptoma/twig-markdown suggests installing knplabs/github-api (Needed for using GitHub's Markdown engine provided through their API.)
ajgl/breakpoint-twig-extension suggests installing ext-xdebug (The Xdebug extension is required for the breakpoint to work)
ajgl/breakpoint-twig-extension suggests installing symfony/framework-bundle (The framework bundle to integrate the extension into Symfony)
ajgl/breakpoint-twig-extension suggests installing symfony/twig-bundle (The twig bundle to integrate the extension into Symfony)
psy/psysh suggests installing ext-pcntl (Enabling the PCNTL extension makes PsySH a lot happier :))
psy/psysh suggests installing ext-posix (If you have PCNTL, you'll want the POSIX extension as well.)
psy/psysh suggests installing ext-pdo-sqlite (The doc command requires SQLite to work.)
psy/psysh suggests installing hoa/console (A pure PHP readline implementation. You'll want this if your PHP install doesn't already support readline or libedit.)

Answer 1

These are only suggestions that may extend the functionality of already installed packages, but everything should work fine without them. For example monolog/monolog will suggest a couple of plugins that will allow logging into different backends. But monolog/monolog will work without them - you may not be able to log for example to Sentry, but monolog will still be usable without this feature.
So usually you can just ignore these suggestions. But you can take a few minutes to check what these suggested packages are actually doing - you can learn about new technologies and solutions that can make your app better and easier to maintain.
If you're really not interested in these suggestions, you can use --no-suggest switch to avoid displaying them on install/update/require:
composer install --no-suggest