How do you manage your dependency libraries? - php

Question

How do you manage your dependency libraries? I separate my project into a bunch of libraries, because these libraries are also used in several other projects. In the beginning, I make each of them as Git repo, and I use Git submodule to manage them. Soon it becomes a nightmare. Once I make some changes, I have to commit in submodule, this is tedious, and need tremendous work.
I am wondering how Sylius did that, they keep each bundle as Git and Packagist repo, but they don't use Git or Composer to manage their own bundles.

Answer 1

The best way is to use composer to manage your dependencies and to autoload all your classes.
The first step in order to achieve that is to prepare all your components to be ready for composer, so each one of your dependencies will have their own composer.json at the root. A basic configuration may look like that:
{
"name": "your/component-name",
"description": "your description",
"license": "proprietary",
"authors": [
{
"name": "Your name",
"email": "you#mail"
}
],
"autoload": {
"psr-4": {
"Your\\Complete\\Namespace": "src/"
}
},
... etc ...
}
The name field is the name you will use to load the dependencies in your main project
The autoload section is very important since it will determine the base namespace of all your classes. When you'll import your dependencies in your main project, you will access to your component classes via this namespace.
When your dependencies will be ready, you will prepare your main project to load them via composer. So basically, the composer.json structure of this project will look quite the same as the previous with more options in order to load your dependencies
{
"name": "your/project-name",
"description": "your description",
"license": "proprietary",
"authors": [
{
"name": "Your name",
"email": "you#mail"
}
],
"autoload": {
"psr-4": {
"Your\\Project\\Namespace": "src/"
}
},
"require": {
"your/dependency1-name" : "dev-master",
"your/dependency2-name" : "dev-master",
....
},
"repositories": [
{
"type": "git",
"url": "https://github.com/the-git-url-of-your-project1"
},
{
"type": "git",
"url": "https://github.com/the-git-url-of-your-project2"
}
]
... etc ...
}
each line of the require part will allow you to configure all the dependencies you want to load (its the name part of the dependency composer.json) in which version (dev-master or the number of the tag if you have some).
repositories part: Except if your dependencies are on packagist (https://packagist.org/), you'll have to add the repository of your dependencies (it could be github, bitbucket etc...). It the same url you can find in the clone section of your repo.
This is the steps you have to follow in order to manage your dependencies with composer. Obsviously, you really need to check the documentation to adapt it to your needs cause its just an basic overview of what you can do with composer.
when everything is ready, a composer install should load your dependencies in a vendor directory and all your classes available by its namespace.
You can look at the documentation for more options:
https://getcomposer.org/doc/
And this usefull Cheat Sheet
http://composer.json.jolicode.com/

Answer 2

I see in comment (i can't add comments) that you want to commit all changes made in your main application to all bundles.
You can look at the no-api option of composer:
"repositories": [
{
"type": "git",
"no-api": true,
"url": "https://github.com/the-git-url-of-your-project1"
}
]
composer will do a git clone when you do a composer install
Another solution without the use of composer is to use git submodules