Warning: This post is outdated and may not reflect the current state of the art
composerIt has been proven to be the best modern dependency management solution for PHP.
Composer meets the demand, and now works withnpmis forNode.jspackage.
CombinePackaging expert, The official repository of the Composer package, it is a utility you can’t avoid.
Install Composer on OSX/Linux
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
with
mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
More details about installation
Use composer
Initialize Composer by typing
composer initin the root of the project. Follow the instructions, you’ll end up with a composer.json file. This is the file that contains all the project dependencies.
Now type
composer installThis command will download all the dependencies in the vendor folder and create a composer.lock file.
The vendor folder contains the packages folders, plus an autoload.php file and the composer folder, which are internal Composer files.
To include the dependencies include vendor/autoload.php in your PHP main file:
require 'vendor/autoload.php'and all will just work.
Adding dependencies
To add more dependencies to the project type
composer require packagename:1.0Example:
composer require filp/whoops:2.0Updating dependencies
Run
composer updateComposer will search for updates for the packages you specified, taking into consideration any versions limit you added, and will update the composer.lock file.
Package versions
Most used version formats:
- “1.0”: will install that precise version
- “~1.0”: will install any update to 1.0, 1.0.1, 1.0.20 but will not install version 1.1 and later versions.
composer.lock
Whenever you update the installed dependencies running composer install or composer update, the composer.lock file will be updated to reflect it. So if you add this file to the repository everyone that downloads the project and runs composer install will get the exact same versions you installed, even if a newer one satisfying the version limits in composer.json is available.
They need to run composer update to get the latest releases available.
Package updates notifications
Add your project’s composer.json and composer.lock to VersionEye to be notified via email when your dependencies are updated, so you can update them in your project.
Security issues in your dependencies
Add your composer.lock to Security Advisories Checker
A note on PEAR
PEAR was the older widely used package manager. The major disadvantage over Composer is that dependencies are installed globally, so there is no version fine-tuning allowed for projects. Once you update a PEAR package, every project on the system will use the new version, and depending on your scenario, this might be a problem.