A little history

PEAR

• PHP Extension and Application Repository
• Founded 2000 on the "new" PHP 4
• Required root to use properly (WTF?)
• Complex process for adding packages
• Easy to get wrong

Symfony 2.0

• Initial alpha, Symfony Live Paris, February 2010
• PHPBB: We're rebuilding on it!
• Symfony2 uses 3rd party libs (Doctrine, Monolog)

Dependency Hell

We need a dependency system!

April 2011

Nils Aderman (PHPBB): libzypp -> PHP

Jordi Boggiano (Monolog): Packagist, front-end for PEAR

With their powers combined...

Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It allows you to declare the dependent libraries your project needs and it will install them in your project for you.

Uhh, what?

• No more Copy/Paste of libraries
• Resolves dependencies
• Each project defines its own requirements
• Performs build tasks

September 2011

Packagist.org

1. Monolog
2. Twig
3. Pirum
4. Swiftmailer
5. Pimple
6. Symfony

I'd say until early 2012 it was pretty unusable, yet people used it. I guess that's how badly it was needed.

— Jordi Boggiano

Package count

April 2013: 10,000 packages

(Not just Symfony!)

Libraries

Some of the libraries available via Composer include...

Symfony

PHP framework for web applications

http://symfony.com

Zend Framework

PHP framework for web applications

http://framework.zend.com

PHPUnit

Unit testing software framework for PHP

http://phpunit.de

Guzzle

HTTP client & framework for building RESTful web service clients

http://guzzlephp.org

Solarium

Solr client library for PHP

http://solarium-project.org

Elastica

Elasticsearch search engine/database for PHP

http://elastica.io

Monolog

Log to files, sockets, inboxes, databases and various web services

https://github.com/seldaek/monolog

Assetic

JavaScript, stylesheet, and image asset management

http://github.com/kriswallsmith/assetic

And 10,000 others

Let's Do This

Get Composer

# Quick-n-easy:
$ curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

# Global
$ curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --install-dir=bin

Run Composer

$ composer.phar --version
Composer version d498e7

Setup

-rw-rw-r-- composer.json (your composer file)
drwxrwxr-x src/          (your code)
-rw-rw-r-- index.php     (your front controller)

composer.json

Base manifest file for your project

{
    "name": "crell/myapp",
    "description": "This app is amazing.",
    "require": {
        "guzzle/guzzle": "3.4.*"
    },
    "autoload": {
        "psr-0": {
            "MyName\\MyPackage": "src/"
        }
    }
}

composer install

Installs all dependencies for your project

$ composer.phar install
Loading composer repositories with package information
Installing dependencies (including require-dev)
  - Installing symfony/event-dispatcher (v2.3.1)
    Downloading: 100%

  - Installing guzzle/guzzle (v3.4.3)
    Downloading: 100%

symfony/event-dispatcher suggests installing symfony/dependency-injection ()
symfony/event-dispatcher suggests installing symfony/http-kernel ()
Writing lock file
Generating autoload files

And now

-rw-rw-r-- composer.json (your composer file)
-rw-rw-r-- composer.lock (generated)
drwxrwxr-x src/          (your code)
-rw-rw-r-- index.php     (your front controller)
drwxrwxr-x vendor/       (everyone else's code)

Only put these in Git

-rw-rw-r-- composer.json (your composer file)
-rw-rw-r-- composer.lock (generated)
drwxrwxr-x src/          (your code)
-rw-rw-r-- index.php     (your front controller)
drwxrwxr-x vendor/       (everyone else's code)

index.php

require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

// Every class is now yours to command!

// Autoload on demand! Your work: zero.
$client = new Guzzle\Http\Client('https://api.github.com');
$request = $client->get('/user')->setAuth('user', 'pass');
$response = $request->send();
echo $response->getBody();

composer.lock

Your exact dependency commits.

composer update

Updates all dependencies to the latest version

$ php composer.phar update
Loading composer repositories with package information
Updating dependencies

What to use?

Versioning

{
    "require": {
        "guzzle/guzzle": "3.4.*",
        "nocarrier/hal": ">=0.9, <=1.0",
        "pimple/pimple": "~1.0",
        "monolog/monolog": "dev-master#2eb0c097",
        "easyrdf/easyrdf": "0.8.*@3ebb7d",
        "php": ">=5.3.10",
        "ext-pdo": "*"
    }
}

And more...

• Script hooks
• Archive packages
• Alternate install directories
• And more

Your turn

ApiProblem

• Simple utility library
• IETF draft spec
• GitHub

ApiProblem

-rw-rw-r-- composer.json
-rw-rw-r-- LICENSE
-rw-rw-r-- phpunit.xml.dist
-rw-rw-r-- README.md
drwxrwxr-x src
drwxrwxr-x tests

composer.json

{
    "name": "crell/api-problem",
    "description": "PHP wrapper for the api-problem IETF specification",
    "license": "MIT",
    "keywords": ["api-problem", "rest", "http", "json", "xml"],
    "homepage": "https://github.com/Crell/ApiProblem",
    "authors": [{
            "name": "Larry Garfield",
            "email": "larry@garfieldtech.com",
            "homepage": "http://www.garfieldtech.com/"
     }],
    "autoload": {
        "psr-0": {"Crell\\ApiProblem": "src/"}
    },
    "require": {
        "php": ">=5.3.3"
    },
    "require-dev": {
        "phpunit/phpunit": "3.7.*"
    }
}

On GitHub

Packagist.org

GitHub-Packagist

GitHub-Packagist

In your code

{
    "require": {

        "crell/api-problem": "1.0-beta1"
    }
}

Private Repositories

Satis allows you to host your own Composer repositories

{
  "repositories": [
    {
      "type": "composer",
      "url": "http://packages.example.org/"
    }
  ],
  "require": {
    "company/package": "1.2.0",
    "company/package2": "1.5.2",
    "company/package3": "dev-master"
  }
}

github.com/composer/satis