php-project-with-composer

All java developers like to use maven to manage their project, it is very convenient, and many phpers will ask if there is a tool like maven can help we phpers to manage our projects. Ofcourse it has, it's called Composer.

Composer is a dependency manager for PHP, it help you declare, manage and install dependencies of PHP projects. It is writen in php language completely.

Install and use it as a linux command

First of all, we should install composer, you can install it within your single project, but I like to install it globally.

$ curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --install-dir=$HOME/Bin

$ mv $HOME/Bin/composer.phar $HOME/Bin/composer

As always I do, I like to place some frequently-used command tools in my $HOME/Bin directory, ofcourse $HOME/Bin is in my PATH variable.Then I can use it by just inputing composer command.

Init PHP web project using composer

PHP as a easy to use and high development efficiency language, a lot of medium and small-sized enterprises like to use it as their main languages. With some caching technology it will be a suitable solutions for them. You use php to support your website you should select an open-source php framework, and you want to use composer, your php framework must support composer.

I will recommend you a year's best php framework and use composer to create and manage your web project based on it. The framework is Laravel,it is not faster than yaf, but I think it is a very good php framework and its efficiency is totally acceptable to us.

$ composer create-project laravel/laravel [ProjectName] --prefer-dist

If the command above execute for a long time, maybe you have another choice.Download Laravel-PHAR-archive and put it in your $HOME/Bin directory, then execute command below.

$ laravel new [ProjectName]

After execute the command above, the first level of your project directory is as below:

--app/
  --config // all configs, Config::get('file.arrkey', 'default'), different env with different sub-directory
  --models
  --views
  --controllers
  --start // some app startup init config, different env with env name php file
  filters.php // App or Route filters
  routes.php // Restfull router
  ...
--bootstrap/
  autoload.php // select vendor/autoload.php as autoload mechanism
  start.php // app startup script
  path.php
--public/
  index.php // entrance script
  ...
--vendor/ // place all dependencies of your project
artisan
composer.json
composer.lock
CONTRIBUTING.md
phpunit.xml
readme.md
server.php

run php artison serve to view website.

Use composer in common PHP library project

I want to write a php library, first I will need to init my project with a file called composer.json which is used to declare the library, below is my repo AhoCorasick-PHP's composer.json. With using psr-4, you can use namespace namespace Baijian\Algorithm without making directory Baijian and Alogorithm, it's cool~

{
    "name": "baijian/ahocorasick",
        "description": "",
        "keywords": ["ahocorasick"],
        "license": "",
        "authors": [
            {
                "name": "baijian",
                "email": "jian.baij@gmail.com",
                "role": "Learner"
            }
        ],
        "homepage": "http://joinjoy.me",
        "autoload": {
            "psr-4": {
                "Baijian\\Algorithm\\" : "src/"
            }
        },
        "require": {
            "php": ">=5.3.0"
        },
        "require-dev": {
            "phpunit/phpunit": "3.7.*"
        },
        "config": {
            "preferred-install": "dist"
        },
        "scripts": {
            "post-install-cmd": [
                "php index.php"  // execute after composer install
            ]
        }
}

Then execute composer install --prefer-dist, it will install the dependences in the folder of vendor, and then create a file composer.lock for you.vendor should be ignored. Then you created src folder and then write your code file in your src folder.At last in the root directory of you project, you create a index.php file and require the vendor/autoload.php file, then you can use the code in src folder to test your php library.

Composer usage in common

All the commands of composer are here. And I will list some common commands.

composer selfupdate is to update composer.
composer install --profile the --profile is to see execute time of the execution.
composer update foo/bar to update specific vendor for you.
composer update --lock to update composer.lock file only.
composer require "foo/bar:0.0.1" to add a vendor.
composer create-project vendor/project dir [version] --prefer-dist to create a project, and setup from a dist package. Such as:composer create-project laravel/laravel webdemo --prefer-dist and dist packages are cached in $HOME/.composer directory automatically.
composer status -v to see if you modify the code of your vendor direcotory, maybe sometimes you want to fix bug of one library, you can reserve it when composer update
composer dump-autoload --optimize to optimize the autoload files before publish it.

At last you'd better know scripts config in composer.json, it can help you install some hooks(or callback) in some specific period.Such as post-install-cmd will be executed after you run composer install. All the period see here