PHP Composer

Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will manage (install/update) them for you.
Composer is an application-level package manager for PHP. It is inspired by NodeJs's NPM and Ruby's Bundler, and is currently the recognized package manager by the community.
The Composer ecosystem consists of two parts:

• the Composer, which is the command-line utility for installing packages,
• the Packagist, the default package repository.

Tutorial Remarks

Install faker:

$ mkdir /Users/Shared/Sources/Tutorials/Composer 
$ cd /Users/Shared/Sources/Tutorials/Composer
$ composer require fzaninotto/faker

Under the hood, Composer downloads the zip file of Faker from Github. Besides downloading the required package, Composer will also create some internal files. The structure look like:

Composer
-rw-r--r--  1 xxxx  yyyy    62B May 15 12:09 composer.json
-rw-r--r--  1 xxxx  yyyy   2.1K May 15 12:09 composer.lock
drwxr-xr-x  5 xxxx  yyyy   160B May 15 12:09 vendor
   -rw-r--r--   1 xxxx  yyyy   178B May 15 12:09 autoload.php
   drwxr-xr-x  10 xxxx  yyyy   320B May 15 12:09 composer
        -rw-r--r--  1 xxxx  yyyy    13K May 15 12:09 ClassLoader.php
        -rw-r--r--  1 xxxx  yyyy   1.0K May 15 12:09 LICENSE
        -rw-r--r--  1 xxxx  yyyy   147B May 15 12:09 autoload_classmap.php
        -rw-r--r--  1 xxxx  yyyy   149B May 15 12:09 autoload_namespaces.php
        -rw-r--r--  1 xxxx  yyyy   211B May 15 12:09 autoload_psr4.php
        -rw-r--r--  1 xxxx  yyyy   1.7K May 15 12:09 autoload_real.php
        -rw-r--r--  1 xxxx  yyyy   830B May 15 12:09 autoload_static.php
        -rw-r--r--  1 xxxx  yyyy   1.5K May 15 12:09 installed.json
   drwxr-xr-x   3 xxxx  yyyy    96B May 15 12:09 fzaninotto
        drwxr-xr-x  9 xxxx  yyyy   288B May 15 12:09 faker
        ...

See also

Internal

• PHP

External

• Get Composer, Home page.
• Composer Documentation, Composer Home page Documentation.
• Composer Packgist, Packagist is the main Composer Repository.

Tutorial

• Star Tutorial, Modern PHP Developer Composer.
  Creates the test composer project fzaninotto/faker. See the directory /Users/Shared/Sources/Tutorials/Composer.