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Composer really needs no introduction. At this point the PHP community pulled in billions of packages. Here are some Composer options that are not so well known.

You can view the versions of all the packages in your project by running composer show -i. Let's try it out in our Blender Laravel template:

Want to see all the dependencies of the installed packages in a tree? Then run composer show -t:

If you need help using a specific package then you can open it's documentation in a browser using composer. Try running composer home spatie/laravel-fractal to see it in action.

Know some other nice Composer tricks? Let me know in the comments below.

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Mr. Composer, Jordi Boggiano, has posted an overview of composer features that have become available in the past year. A very nice one is config.platform.

The `config.platform` option lets you emulate which platform packages you have available on your prod environment. That way even if you have a more recent PHP version or are missing an extension locally for example, composer will always resolve packages assuming that you have the packages you declared installed.

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Climb checks your composer files to see which packages are outdated, regardless of your version constraints. Without Climb, there's no way of knowing if a package has a new major release unless you use a notification system like Gemnasium. Climb is one of those tools you just need to get on your tool belt.

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Everywhere that I go, conference, the supermarket, the dentist, building sites, people always ask me about the Composer lock file. It's a mystery that seems to cause confusion all across the globe. Well, boys and girls, I'm here today to de-mystify the lock file once and for all.

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Here's a quick composer tip. The next time you require a dependency, use --sort-packages to alphabetically sort the dependencies in your composer.json. For example:

composer require spatie/string --sort-packages

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Satis allows you to require private php packages in your projects. One of it's authors is Jordi Boggiano of composer/packagist fame. Over at the excellent Laravelista blog Mario Bašić explains how to install and use it.

I was working on three projects at the same time and I've found myself copying code from one project to another and then making small changes. And then I recognized a pattern. ...

I created a package and as soon as it was ready for GitHub I remembered: "I can't open source this...". The package contained few paid html templates, company logo's, slogans, specific company text etc. ...

This post will explain what Satis is, when to use it and how to set it up on your server.

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There are also some syntactic sugar operators like `~` (tilde) and `^` (caret).

• `~4.1.3` means `>=4.1.3,<4.2.0`,
• `~4.1` means `>=4.1.0,<5.0.0` (most used),
• `~0.4` means `>=0.4.0,<1.0.0`,
• `~4` means `>=4.0.0,<5.0.0`.

The caret sign is slightly different:

• `^4.1.3` (most used) means `>=4.1.3,<5.0.0`,
• `^4.1` means `>=4.1.0,<5.0.0`, same as `~4.1` but:
• `^0.4` means `>=0.4.0,<0.5.0`, this is different from `~0.4` and is more useful for defining backwards compatible version ranges.
• `^4` means `>=4.0.0,<5.0.0` which is the same as `~4` and `4.*`.

 

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Composer is one of the most important pillars of the PHP renaissance. If you're not using it, you're doing it wrong.

It's main repository Packagist reports that there were 525 773 737 package installs since april 2012.

https://packagist.org/statistics

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If you've been following the news, you'll have noticed that yesterday Composer got a bit of a speed boost. And by "bit of a speed boost", we're talking between 50% and 90% reduction in runtime depending on the complexity of the dependencies. But how did the fix work? And should you make the same sort of change to your projects? For those of you who want the TL/DR answer: the answer is no you shouldn't.

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