Composer Package Development tips and tricks

If you are a PHP developer and do active PHP Development then there are a lot of chances that you would want to develop a Package and use it in your application.

This is a very short article (rather a tip) which will help you with package development.

If you have your package ready, with PSR-4 Autoloading and you do not want to publish it on Packagist or simply want to test it on your development environment then simply you can use composer repositories option.

Just add following code in your composer.json file where you want to use the package.

"require": {
    ....
    "<vendor-name>/<package-name>": "dev-master",
    ....
},
"repositories": [
    {
        "type": "vcs",
        "url": "[e-mail]:<vendor-name>/<repository-name>.git"
    }
],

It will auto-pull the Package from Github (or any other VCS) and set it up for you to start with your development (provided you have repository access).

I was following the same and it worked flawlessly multiple developers were working on the Package and it worked like magic but then there was another catch, I wanted to avoid pushing on git and wanted to test the package in an application. composer to the rescue, composer allows local path in repository like this:

"require": {
    ....
    "<vendor-name>/<package-name>": "dev-master",
    ....
},
"repositories": [
    {
        "type": "path",
        "url": "/Users/user/package"
    }
],

It worked but the problem was before pushing the code, I had to make changes from VCS to Path in the calling application’s composer file. which was a pain, I tried searching options for commenting in composer.json file or some other options where I can keep the local and production environment together. The internet spoke the truth, No, there is no way to comment in composer.json file. but I found a work-around on stackoverflow.

Apparently, you can have multiple composer.json files in your PHP application and you can mention it run-time, which one to use for installing packages.

you can do:

    composer install // or composer update

which will install the packages from composer.json file and you can do

    COMPOSER=composer-local.json composer install // or composer update

which will load the packages from composer-local.json file.

Hope these tricks will be useful for you.

Thank you for reading.

Happy coding!!!

Originally published on Medium