I downloaded Laravel from github and save it on c:/htdocs/laravel1
and I created a copy of my laravel with CMD (with composer) and I install this as laravel2 in c:/htdocs/laravel2 directory.
Laravel1:
c:/htdocs/laravel1
Laravel2:
c:/htdocs/laravel2
And I have access to both of them in localhost:8080/laravel1/public/ and
localhost:8080/laravel2/public/
My question is : Why should I install laravel by composer? There is no different between the installed laravel and downloaded laravel.
There are many, many valid reasons to use composer:
Composer creates optimized autoloaders if you want it to
Allows you to add thrird party dependencies easily (just add them to composer.json)
You can track the composer.lock file, and use composer install to ensure the exact same versions of the dependencies are being used throughout (on all environments, by everyone contribbuting) This is a must-have, if you're using automated builds!
Updating all dependencies, including Laravel, is a simple matter of composer update
Composer supports post-install and post-update scripts, to be executed after a composer install/update is run. This is quite commonly used to prompt the dev for configuration parameters. Downloading the code means you have to edit the config files by hand, and worse of all: track them in git or svn
... I'll probably add more reasons along the way, these are just a few off the top of my head
Update:
Just thought of some more reasons why using composer is a good idea:
Composer packages themselves can, and often do, define dependencies and requirements. Things like "php": ">=5.4.0", or "ext-curl": "*" will alert you to any missing PHP extensions or a version mismatch. These requirements can also trigger composer to fetch additional dependencies. Which brings me on to the next point:
Laravel itself has dependencies: Laravel uses components from Symfony2, for example. The easiest way to manage its own dependencies is to use composer, seeing as Symfony does, too. If you run composer update, the dependencies of Laravel will be checked, and updated where needed. Doing this manually is possible, but it's tedious, and really not worth the bother. Repetitive, dull jobs make people grumpy. Computers don't have this problem.
Composer is a dependancy manager similar to node's npm which allows quick and easy management of 3rd party libraries & packages on a per-project basis.
I recommend reading https://getcomposer.org/doc/00-intro.md to find out more about composer and explore https://packagist.org to find out the kind of things that are available through composer
Related
composer install will install whenever stated in the composer.lock file, but composer update will update all the dependencies and create a new composer.lock file based on what is required in composer.json.
So many said only run composer update in development. But my question is doing composer update did replaced the old composer.lock file, if your app is going to break it will break, because there might be conflict with the new updated dependencies.
I came across with a situation where I must do composer update, the issue is related to pcntl extension. The only solution is to do composer update PHP pcntl module installation
I don't understand why people are afraid of running composer update on production.
TLDR;
Do not run composer update nor composer install in production. Execute it somewhere else and upload the result to the production server, but not to the same directory where the application is hosted. As a general rule, you shouldn't modify the application that's being served while it's being served. Create a different copy of the application and when it's ready replace it with the closest to instantaneous command you can (e.g. mv or ln -s).
But if you HAVE to run either: always run install and create a fresh installation; and never update. install is more predictable and reliable, with update you are at the mercy of any of the project's dependencies.
Composer works recursively. So even if you have very tight version constraints in your composer.json, by running composer update you would be updating not only your dependencies, but your dependencies' dependencies.
While most of the time this won't introduce breakage, sometimes it will. One dependency down the line may introduce a change of behaviour that may impact your code in a way you may have not tested against.
Also, it's basically using the wrong tool for the job. Composer is a dependency management tool, not a deployment tool. To deploy your code to production you should be using some sort of code deployment tool (even if that "tool" is as simple as an FTP upload and a couple of scripts).
The appropriate flow is:
Do all the require and update calls on your development machine, where you can test the project without risk. This generates a composer.lock, which is a known state for the whole project, with discrete installed versions.
Create a new installable version doing install --no-dev. On this step you also should dump an optimized autoloader, run after-install scripts, etc. I usually separate this in more than one step:
composer install --prefer-dist --no-scripts --no-progress --no-suggest --no-interaction --no-dev:
^^ This for a complete, silent installation of everything, excluding development dependencies.
composer dump-autoload --optimize --no-dev
^^ To dump an optimized autoloader script suitable for production.
composer run-script --no-dev post-install-cmd
^^ This is mostly for Symfony, but if you have any post-install scripts to run (e.g. to copy assets to your "public" directory, warm-up some type of cache, anything like that), this would be a good moment to do it.
The result of the above step should be tested (in what typically is a staging environment), and then pushed to production whole (your client code, the vendor folder, the configuration tailored for prod, etc); using whatever deployment method you prefer.
Note that if you use any "slow" push method (FTP, copy, rsync, etc), you shouldn't write directly to the application filesystem, but create a fresh copy of the application and once the file transfer is ready, use a quick method to replace "production" with the new release. A popular and effective way is use a symlink as "production" root, so you only need to update the symlink once all of the above is done and ready, without impacting a running application (that otherwise could be temporarily broken, by virtue of suddenly containing files that belong to different versions of the application).
My thoughts about this are,
The current working state of the system is very important as I would assume some tests have been run against it.
To do composer update would mean that, libraries that are part of the app would have their updates and which may lead to breakage in the system. Because they are libraries that depends on libraries that depends on libraries.
Finally, I would rather do this if composer-update is needed:
Checkout on a dev environment and composer update,
Ensure the app is thoroughly tested on a dev environment
then install on live/production with composer install
My thoughts here :
You should never use composer update without argument.
composer update reads every package listed on composer.json, and updates it to the latest available version compatible with the specified version constraints.
In a perfect world, all librairies would follow semver correctly, and it shouldn't have any side effects. But technically, that is never always true, and you could download a version incompatible with the previous one, or just a version with uncorrected bugs.
So, updating all your packages at once would probably lead to some issues, unless you have the time to check everything on your website to ensure nothing went wrong.
But of course, you'll have to update specific packages sometimes, so using composer update xxx/xxx is useful, assuming you'll check all your implementations of the package.
When the updated package is fully tested, you can commit your code to staging/production, and then run composer install to ensure you'll have the same exact version of package and dependencies on all your platforms.
Long story short, here's the process I use :
composer require xxx/xxx to install new packages
composer update xxx/xxx to update a specific package
composer install on all environments when the package.lock file has been updated.
Additional thoughts
I stumbled once upon an implementation which would give the exact version of the package in composer.json. The developer explained that this way you could use composer update without damage.
I disagree with this option, since even with the exact versions in composer.json, the dependencies are not fixed, and a composer update could lead to potential bugs in them.
I am reading/learning about Composer, the application-level package manager for PHP.
In this blog post written by lead dev Jordi Boggiano, he writes:
Composer on the other hand forces you to declare your project
dependencies in a one-stop location (composer.json at the root). You
just checkout the code, install dependencies, and they will sit in the
project directory, not disturbing anything else on the machine.
Another related feature is the composer.lock file that is generated
when you install or update dependencies. It stores the exact version
of every dependency that was used. If you commit it, anyone checking
out the project will be able to install exactly the same versions as
you did when you last updated that file, avoiding issues because of
minor incompatibilities or regressions in different versions of a
dependency.
If I understand Composer properly, when we're talking about packages downloaded/installed by Composer, we are talking about PHP code packages, ie, programming code written in PHP, and not system-level packages, eg, extensions to the PHP runtime installed on the server. So once these PHP code packages have been downloaded and added to a PHP project, I would have thought those packages become part of the PHP application source code, eg to be checked in to whichever version control system is being used for the project. If another developer comes along and checks out the code, why would they need to then "install the packages", as is stated in the blog post? Wouldn't they get a copy of all code packages when they check out the code from source control? This line in the blog post is confusing me, and making me think I don't understand Composer.
Any clarity on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
The dependencies themselves should not be commited to source control. The composer.json and composer.lock files, on the other hand, should. There's various reasons for this, amongst them:
Every time you update the dependency you would have to commit the changes. That kind of tightly couples your code to the dependency, when it should be exactly the other way around.
The packages themselves are already in their own repository with their own history. Why repeat that in your project's history?
Those repositories can be huge, just muddling the waters around your project. Why carry around all that weight?
Instead, having each developer just run composer install (very important: not composer update) whenever they check out the project is much more efficient. Composer will install the dependencies from composer.lock, making sure everyone running the same commit is on the exact same page. The same goes for deploying.
You can read more about this here.
On the other hand, there might be situations where you have to commit your packages to get around a problem, like for example when you know you won't be able to run composer install on your production server (shared hosting)
Normally packages installed via composer don't get checked in to source control, only the code you write and the composer.json and composer.lock files.
This way the repository for your project does not get bloated with code you did not write and possibly don't really care that much about.
Yes its normal after cloning down your repository a developer will need to run the "composer install" command. The composer.lock file will ensure they get the same modules and versions of them you used when creating your project.
Not including the composer modules in your source control also allow you to easily update to the modules to get bug fixes and new features in new versions of them.
I recently started a project using composer for the first time, and I just deployed it to Q&A (demo), with git I used to just do a git pull and update the Q&A environment, but now with composer update only the dependencies get updated.
My question is, what is the SOP(standard operating procedure) for updating the core project, do I still use git, or is there a way to do it with composer?
Or am I completely doing this wrong, and should be working out of the vendors folder?
The point of Composer is that you don't need to version control the dependencies which means anything that ends up in vendor/.
The project has a composer.json and composer.lock. These are within git's control so it knows the packages and versions to use. However, the vendor/ directory should be ignored, with .gitignore. If you don't already have that set up simply add this line:
/vendor/*
You version control your other files as normal.
So the operating procedure is to use git and normal. Followed by composer update.
The advantage of this setup is that git doesn't have to bother managing potentially thousands of files (inside vendor/) that will never normally change. The only circumstance under which they'd change is if you want to start using a different version of a package, or adding new ones. Well, all of those packages/versions are defined in your composer.json (which git is monitoring for changes). All you need to do is run composer update and it will update everything in your vendor/ directory to the "right" version.
That's one of the advantages of using Composer - all developers can have a "list" of the correct packages/versions, without the need to version control all of the files in them.
Edit as per the comments below:
Note composer update should only be run in development. Use composer install when deploying to QA or production. This will install the exact versions referenced by your composer.lock file.
You keep using git for your project and composer for 3rd party libs.
I have a large web app in PHP (link in my profile), and that's how I've been doing it, and it works good.
When I have new production-ready code and it's ready to be released, I do:
git fetch && git pull
And when I want to update composer, I do:
composer -o update
I don't know if you're familiar with -o flag - it generates static autoloading maps, which makes your project load classes faster. More info here.
composer install will install whenever stated in the composer.lock file, but composer update will update all the dependencies and create a new composer.lock file based on what is required in composer.json.
So many said only run composer update in development. But my question is doing composer update did replaced the old composer.lock file, if your app is going to break it will break, because there might be conflict with the new updated dependencies.
I came across with a situation where I must do composer update, the issue is related to pcntl extension. The only solution is to do composer update PHP pcntl module installation
I don't understand why people are afraid of running composer update on production.
TLDR;
Do not run composer update nor composer install in production. Execute it somewhere else and upload the result to the production server, but not to the same directory where the application is hosted. As a general rule, you shouldn't modify the application that's being served while it's being served. Create a different copy of the application and when it's ready replace it with the closest to instantaneous command you can (e.g. mv or ln -s).
But if you HAVE to run either: always run install and create a fresh installation; and never update. install is more predictable and reliable, with update you are at the mercy of any of the project's dependencies.
Composer works recursively. So even if you have very tight version constraints in your composer.json, by running composer update you would be updating not only your dependencies, but your dependencies' dependencies.
While most of the time this won't introduce breakage, sometimes it will. One dependency down the line may introduce a change of behaviour that may impact your code in a way you may have not tested against.
Also, it's basically using the wrong tool for the job. Composer is a dependency management tool, not a deployment tool. To deploy your code to production you should be using some sort of code deployment tool (even if that "tool" is as simple as an FTP upload and a couple of scripts).
The appropriate flow is:
Do all the require and update calls on your development machine, where you can test the project without risk. This generates a composer.lock, which is a known state for the whole project, with discrete installed versions.
Create a new installable version doing install --no-dev. On this step you also should dump an optimized autoloader, run after-install scripts, etc. I usually separate this in more than one step:
composer install --prefer-dist --no-scripts --no-progress --no-suggest --no-interaction --no-dev:
^^ This for a complete, silent installation of everything, excluding development dependencies.
composer dump-autoload --optimize --no-dev
^^ To dump an optimized autoloader script suitable for production.
composer run-script --no-dev post-install-cmd
^^ This is mostly for Symfony, but if you have any post-install scripts to run (e.g. to copy assets to your "public" directory, warm-up some type of cache, anything like that), this would be a good moment to do it.
The result of the above step should be tested (in what typically is a staging environment), and then pushed to production whole (your client code, the vendor folder, the configuration tailored for prod, etc); using whatever deployment method you prefer.
Note that if you use any "slow" push method (FTP, copy, rsync, etc), you shouldn't write directly to the application filesystem, but create a fresh copy of the application and once the file transfer is ready, use a quick method to replace "production" with the new release. A popular and effective way is use a symlink as "production" root, so you only need to update the symlink once all of the above is done and ready, without impacting a running application (that otherwise could be temporarily broken, by virtue of suddenly containing files that belong to different versions of the application).
My thoughts about this are,
The current working state of the system is very important as I would assume some tests have been run against it.
To do composer update would mean that, libraries that are part of the app would have their updates and which may lead to breakage in the system. Because they are libraries that depends on libraries that depends on libraries.
Finally, I would rather do this if composer-update is needed:
Checkout on a dev environment and composer update,
Ensure the app is thoroughly tested on a dev environment
then install on live/production with composer install
My thoughts here :
You should never use composer update without argument.
composer update reads every package listed on composer.json, and updates it to the latest available version compatible with the specified version constraints.
In a perfect world, all librairies would follow semver correctly, and it shouldn't have any side effects. But technically, that is never always true, and you could download a version incompatible with the previous one, or just a version with uncorrected bugs.
So, updating all your packages at once would probably lead to some issues, unless you have the time to check everything on your website to ensure nothing went wrong.
But of course, you'll have to update specific packages sometimes, so using composer update xxx/xxx is useful, assuming you'll check all your implementations of the package.
When the updated package is fully tested, you can commit your code to staging/production, and then run composer install to ensure you'll have the same exact version of package and dependencies on all your platforms.
Long story short, here's the process I use :
composer require xxx/xxx to install new packages
composer update xxx/xxx to update a specific package
composer install on all environments when the package.lock file has been updated.
Additional thoughts
I stumbled once upon an implementation which would give the exact version of the package in composer.json. The developer explained that this way you could use composer update without damage.
I disagree with this option, since even with the exact versions in composer.json, the dependencies are not fixed, and a composer update could lead to potential bugs in them.
I am having some weird issues with git submodule update for a Plugin dependency with Jenkins # CloudBees.
So I am switching some, if not, all my dependencies from git submodule to Composer.
I came across this repo called composer installers. https://github.com/composer/installers
I was wondering how to use this for both Plugin and Vendor dependencies.
I am not familiar with Composer and even after reading the docs, I am uncertain how to say, place this dependency specifically to Plugin/xxx
I know how to do this with git submodule add.
So anyone knows how I should use Composer or better yet, Composer installers, please advise me.
To make things easier, I want to use 2 actual examples.
https://github.com/milesj/Utility is to be placed inside my app/Plugin/Utility
https://github.com/simkimsia/php-gd-simpleimage is to be placed inside my app/Vendor/SimpleImage
There is a Composer plugin for CakePHP that has a Backery article about it. The code is available on Github:
https://github.com/uzyn/cakephp-composer
It's actively being developed (last commit was yesterday), but in my early use of it (today), it seems to be working as expected.
Packagist has loads of Compose-ready libraries. Some of them are CakePHP related. Some are not.
The two examples you listed aren't in Packagist (yet?). Thankfully, Composer makes it possible to work directly with Git (and other VCS) repos. For the milesj/Utility plugin (which has a composer.json file), you'll need to follow the Repositories guide in the Composer docs to set things up properly.
For the php-gd-simpleimage repo, you'll need to write a composer.json file, then follow the Repositories steps.
One of the most confusing things about Composer is that composer.json is the same system/file-format for both libraries and "projects." Really, they're all the same to Composer. In your "project" repo, though, you're only outlining requirements (usually), not making your application installable via Composer. Regardless of their locations, both composer.json files are for the same thing: tracking and installing dependencies. You can imagine it as a tree with your project (and it's composer.json) at the top, and then a branching dependency tree all the way down.
Happy Composing!