Sounds weird, but I thought composer was a tool that one used to install packages in PHP stacks. An efficient and robust way to make sure that php environments are setup correctly.
But I keep coming across forum posts that talk about caching and advising to do things like composer clear-cache as if it was part of the actual running application. Like it's actively doing things in the running app.
Am I missing something?
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(refer link.
It helps us installing/updating various requirements/components for our app such as Laravel framework, Doctrine, lodash etc..
If you have ever written anything in PHP before, you have probably found that it feels like you have to keep re-inventing the wheel anytime you want to do a common task such as User Authentication, Database Management or Request Routing.
If you were to start manually picking the bits you wanted from Laravel then it would become very difficult to manage. Each library might also have dependencies, and so you would end up in a mess, particularly if you required other people to work on your project.
This is where Composer comes in. Composer is a dependency manager for PHP. Composer will manage the dependencies you require on a project by project basis. This means that Composer will pull in all the required libraries, dependencies and manage them all in one place.
Managing your dependencies manually in any programing language is an immense pain. This is often why, in most programming languages these days you may notice that all of them have some implementation of a dependency management system or generally a package manager.
In PHP, we use NPM i.e Node Package Manager in frontend technologies like JavaScript, VueJS. For backend, Composer is the de facto dependency manager.
Laravel is itself a package of packages, hence to develop our projects smoothly among the team members, dependency management becomes a must and composer does its work under the hood, silently but efficiently.
Composer is an application-level package manager for the PHP programming language that provides a standard format for managing dependencies of PHP software and required libraries.
Composer runs through the command line and installs dependencies (e.g. libraries) for an application. It also allows users to install PHP applications that are available on "Packagist" which is its main repository containing available packages. It also provides autoload capabilities for libraries that specify autoload information to ease usage of third-party code.
Composer is used as an integral part of several popular open-source PHP projects, including Laravel.
Related
I'm a bit confused about using Composer.
I have built my own package manager, that uses a config-file and a large SVN-repo that contains all possible libraries (both PHP and Javascript / CSS) I need in several different projects. I download these packages myself from the library websites.
Now I'm trying to use Composer instead, since I like the automatic dependency checking and want to use something that everybody else does. But how do you decide what packages are best?
For example, for CodeMirror, I used to download the latest stable version from https://codemirror.net/ . But when I look in Packagist I see so many different versions that I don't know which to choose. It seems everybody can create new packages for Composer ? I just need the official ones.
So, how do you guys pick the packages you need?
To answer your question directly, for any component you want to import into your project, the way to find the "canonical" source - as opposed to various forks - is to go back to the original source and see what their usage/install instructions suggest. If they support a Packagist-based install, they will usually say so. If not, but there is a composer.json in their (typically) Github repository, then you can add the repository to your composer.json and then require the package as normal.
However, more generally, I think there is some confusion about what Composer really does. As noted in the comments, Composer is a dependency manager for PHP. Packagist is the primary repository for composer-managed packages. The CodeMirror library you cited is fundamentally a javascript library.
Now it's true that if you search for "codemirror" on Packagist, you will see lots of results there, some of which are labeled as Javascript components. But they are primarily:
wrappers that allow consumers to interact with or simply load CodeMirror in PHP-based view-scripts, like conquer/codemirror for the Yii framework, or nitrado/code-mirror-bundle for the Symfony framework; or
shim repositories for the Components project - like components/jquery, for example - which are then installed using the command-line script from their Component Installer for Composer
Bottom line: Composer is primarily used for importing PHP packages. It takes some gymnastics - like the Component Installer for Composer noted above - to make it usable/helpful for non-PHP packages.
Composer is very awesome for managing dependencies and makes life so much easier.
However, I am a bit unsure where I should place data files to be used by my composer requirements.
For example, the Maxmind GeoIP library is something I am using. Because the maxmind databases are provided independently of the PHP library and have a different cycle, there really isn't a way to make it a composer requirement.
Should I add them as packages to my composer.json? Since I have a Satis installation for serving private repos, should I create my own repo for those datafiles?
What is the accepted practice of dealing with vendor databases and datafiles when using composer?
If you want to manage the data via composer, I would suggest to configure them as an own package, which you require on project level.
There is no default workflow for non php parts. Especially databases are rarely managed via composer, as there is no standard for doing migrations.
In my opinion, migration scripts should not be part of composer, because only your application should alter your databases, and only when you want it to, not when you execute composer commands.
The GeoIP datas are a bit different, this is only a kind resource file you use. If I look at attempts regarding java-script and similar, its common to have a separate composer package for them. So like I said first, add the data in an own package, which you can maintain separate from the GeoIp Library
I'm looking for a script that will quickly implement package install/update functionality for my framework. It should be able to do the following things:
Must be PHP 5 compatible.
Should be able to install and update components' files and database tables.
Should allow defining of package dependencies and have a form of conflict resolving.
Should allow UPDATE SQL-statements when the developer of the package provides it. (To make database alterations without losing data).
Should be able to 'jail' an update package to a target folder.
Should be able to define and detect different package types to apply mentioned 'jail'.
Should provide an API to integrate it in custom backend.
Should allow downloading of the packages, preferably over HTTP (rather than FTP or others).
I plan on using this as a stand-alone utility to easily provide updates for modular frameworks as well as custom code for our clients.
If you have recommendations of tools that are similar or used in an open source framework to base it off that would be good as well. :)
I don't know of any magic tools to do this, but a couple that might help you do these tasks are Phrake and Composer.
Phake is a PHP version of Ruby's Rake util. You could use these scripts to set up your database, update files and run unit tests.
For package management you could use Composer to manage your dependencies (it can also download from PEAR if you depend on packages from those systems) and of course this could be incorporated into your build scripts.
does anyone know a package manager library for PHP (as e.g. apt or yum for linux distros) apart from PEAR? I'm working on a system which should include a package management system for module management. I managed to get a working solution using PEAR, but using the PEAR client for anything else than managing a PEAR installation is not really the optimal solution as it's not designed for that. I would have to modify/extend it (e.g. to implement actions on installation/upgrade or to move PEAR specific files like lockfiles away from the system root) and especially the CLI client code is quite messy and PHP4. So maybe someone has some suggestions
for an alternative PEAR client library which is easy to use and extend (the server side has some nice implementations like Pirum and pearhub)
for completely different package management systems written in PHP (ideally including dependency tracking and different channels)
for some general ideas how to implement such a PM system (yes, I'm still tinkering with the idea of implementing such a system from scratch)
I know that big systems like Magento and symfony use PEAR for their PM. Magento uses a hacked version of the original PEAR client (which I'd like to avoid), symfony's implementation seems quite integrated with the framework, but would be a good starting point to at least write the client from scratch. Anyway, if anybody has suggestions: please :)
There is Composer also.
Have you checked Maven for PHP? I've only used Maven in the context of Java applications, but it's certainly:
Easy to extend – it's really easy to implement Maven plugins
Manages dependencies – distinguishing compile, test and runtime dependencies (though the compile/runtime distintion doesn't make sense in PHP).
Repositories are trivial to put up – Apache with mod_dav will give you a working writable repository, but you also have Nexus.
Distinguishes snapshot from stable artifacts; allows several policies for when to check for new snapshot artifacts and from which repositories get each type.
And many – many – more things.
PEAR2/Pyrus was built for package management for arbitrary applications. I believe it was modeled after the apt/yum architectures.
Helgi - core PEAR member - covers some of it here - http://www.slideshare.net/helgith/pear2-pyrus-the-look-ahead but the documentation is pretty solid too: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/pyrus.extending.installation.php
this is a question on PHP mainly. I was wondering: How do you make sure that all necessary libaries are packaged with your application when you do a deployment to (production) servers?
A more concrete example: I have an app running on Zend Framework and each time I roll the application to a server the deployment process creates a fresh "installation" on that system. Therefore, I need to bundle Zend Framework together with my application and then copy the files to the right places together (it is done automatically). Currently, I am using a svn:externals definition to get the files out of Zend's SVN system during deployment, however, I don't want to rely on that SVN and I also don't want to put traffic on external SVNs with each deployment.
In the Java world, I am used to Maven which handles such stuff using central artifact repositries. I know that there is a Maven4PHP version, however, I am more looking for a PHP-based solution. Additionally, I don't believe that PEAR is a good way to go as it doesn't really fulfill my requirement of bundling the applicaiton (incl. libs) into a single deployable.
Is there some tool available already that I am not aware? Or do you have any great technique that I should know?
Thanks much for your help!
Michael
There's a build system called Phing which is written in PHP and based on Apache Ant.
I personally can very well live with externals.
I think the vendor branching would solve the problem from your example quite straightforward, but if you also don't like large repositories I'd recommended to keep watching on the modern toys like composer and what it solve(and maybe phark, I never heard before :) )
It isn't production ready yet but you might want to keep an eye on the Phark project. It is a port of Bundler to PHP.
While looking through the Simplify your external dependency management slides I came across a tool called pantr which can be used as a PEAR installer. pantr as PEAR installer which allows you to specify your dependencies in a project specific file.
The article Version Control != Dependency Management has some information about using the new PEAR installer called Pyrus