Just in case you’re not aware of Composer is, it’s simply a third-party package managing tool. It brings streamlined efficiency to adding new libraries to your projects by writing simple one-line commands.
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Before you follow any of the guides below, you must ensure that PHP is already installed on your computer. Composer will not run properly without it and you will soon run into problems. In addition, you must set PHP as an environmental variable within your system for shortcut command access to the engine. See the following steps to do it on Windows.
Note: If you don’t have sufficient rights on your computer to install any software, please see the next section, installing on Mac & others. As this is a workaround for Windows users with this issue.
The easiest way to install Composer on windows is by downloading the native Composer-Setup.exe. This installs the required files to your local computer that are ready to be utilized within your projects. See the following steps and sub-steps –
Step 1
Step 2
composer
If you got the response of ‘composer is not recognized as an internal or external command’, then you will need to set the composer bin path in your environmental variables. On my device, this bin folder is located in ‘C:UsersCodeWallAppDataRoamingComposervendorbin’. This is the value you will need to add to your PATH variable.
Composer can be installed via a PHP Archive file, namely composer.phar. This file is available from download page, underneath the Manual Download sub-heading. Opt for the latest version, at the time of writing it is 1.8.0. After the composer.phar file is downloaded,
Step 1
cd ~/phpProject
or on Windows cd C:/phpProject
php composer.phar
Composer should load in the terminal. If it doesn’t and the terminal complains about PHP not being a recognized command, then see the prerequisite of this tutorial.That’s it with the PHP archived package, it is now installed and ready to be utilized as and when without physically installing to your system.
Before you can utilize the power of Composer, see the following checklist is complete
Throughout these remaining examples, the demonstrations will be carried out with a Windows-based system using its native command prompt. Some commands may differ on your operating system but will be easy enough to find in the operating system’s documentation.
Composer needs a kind-of-settings file to run properly, and ultimately for you to instruct it on what it should do. The composer.json file doesn’t come fresh-out-the-box so one must be created. Luckily, the composer engine helps with this task, literally walking you through each step of creation. See the following steps to build the .json file.
Step 1
cd C:project
, make sure you replace the path in the example command with your project path.composer init
Step 2
Now let’s double check that the file was actually generated.
Now for the fun part, the ability to download and install useful libraries with one line commands! There are actually two ways to do it, one via the command line directly. Or specifying the package within the composer.json file first then running a command. This probably sounds a bit confusing, but in the next couple of examples, you will come to understand the meaning of two separate ways.
Method 1. Requiring Packages using the Require command
This first way and my personal favorite is to simply use the Require command and let Composer do its magic. See the following steps to download a package named Guzzle, an excellent HTTP client library, but feel free to choose a library from packagist of your own, there is currently over 200 thousand to pick from!
cd C:project
composer require guzzlehttp/guzzle
and press enter. If you need a specific version, skip this step and see step 3.composer require guzzlehttp/guzzle ^versionNo
) and press enter.Method 2. Requiring Packages using the Install command
So, there is another method of downloading and installing packages without actually specifying the package name in the command line. Rather, you define this in the composer JSON file and simply run.composer install
See the following guide on how to utilize this method correctly.
'guzzlehttp/guzzle': '^6.3'
cd C:project
composer install
and hit enterMethod 3. Requiring Packages using the Update command
There is one last way to install packages but it’s not the recommended choice. Before using this method, it must be understood that all packages in the require section of your JSON file may be updated, and could, in fact, cause issues with dependencies you are already using.
For example,
Package 1 is of version 1.0 currently, and you’re using it throughout your project. When you run composer update, it could update to version 1.2 and some of your code could be using deprecated items or something of a worse case.
Nevertheless, this command can become very handy if you wanted to update all your dependencies in one go!
. See the following guide on how to utilize this method correctly.
'nnnick/chartjs': '^2.7.3'
cd C:project
composer update
and hit enterThis is one of the real gems of Composer, the ability to delete packages with a few simple actions. The fact that the project’s package directories can become vast, it can be trivial to start removing unwanted packages. Not with Composer though, it really makes this part a dream for you. See the following steps on how to remove a package.
cd C:project
composer remove nnnick/chartjs
and hit enterIn this very brief example, you will see how to utilize the projects that you have installed. See the following steps to use the GuzzleHttp package that was installed earlier in this tutorial.
require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
use GuzzleHttpClient;
$guzzle = new Client();
For a further understanding of auto-loading packages, see this very detailed article on phpenthusiast.
For those of you who would rather have this tutorial offline and printed, the tutorial has been compiled into a PDF.
Use the following link to download it.
After this tutorial has been carried out, you will be able to see the power, convenience and great management benefits that are present. Composer is an excellent tool to have and is becoming more and more popular every day. As always, any issues following this tutorial, please let me know in the comments section.