ZF2 Modules & external dependencies - php

Question

I'm not clear on what the best practice is for including external libraries in a custom module that I plan on distributing.
Normally I'd place the external library under the application's vendor directory. But I want to ensure that all dependencies are met when I distribute my custom module (i.e. I don't want to force people to manually download the dependency into their app's vendor directory).
Is the correct practice to include a vendor directory under the module directory as per the the following?
/application_dir
/vendor
/module
/my_module
/vendor

Answer 1

Use composer, you can find documentation here:
Composer Documentation
Basically you would modify the file composer.json in the root of your application and add your dependencies in the require section:
{
"name": "zendframework/skeleton-application",
"description": "Skeleton Application for ZF2",
"license": "BSD-3-Clause",
"keywords": [
"framework",
"zf2"
],
"homepage": "http://framework.zend.com/",
"require": {
"php": ">=5.3.3",
"zendframework/zendframework": "2.2.*",
"doctrine/common": "dev-master",
"zendframework/zendpdf": "2.*",
"zendframework/zendservice-recaptcha": "2.*",
"thiagoalessio/tesseract_ocr": ">= 0.1.2",
"zf-commons/zfc-user": "dev-master"
// add your requirements here**
}
}
if the dependancy is on a private github repository, you can add it like this:
{
"require": {
"vendor/my-private-repo": "dev-master"
},
"repositories": [
{
"type": "vcs",
"url": "git#bitbucket.org:vendor/my-private-repo.git"
}
]
}
Don't forget to do composer.phar update after your done adding them.