What is a Package Manager?

Throughout your training, you will learn to design your code into reusable modules. These modules can then be packaged as dependencies, making them portable and modular. You then add the dependencies to your project, thereby adding them to your application.

How do you add these packages? How can you add external packages, such as Zurb’s Foundation or Carbon to your project?

You use a package manager.

What are the Benefits?

When your project depends upon a package/module/library, i.e. some external piece of software, a package manager loads the packages as well as each dependency into your local project. For example, let’s say you need Carbon in your project. Looking at the composer.json file for Carbon, it depends upon PHP and Symfony’s Translation package in the production version, and on PHPUnit in the development version. When you specify Carbon as a dependency in your project, Composer will load each of Carbon’s dependencies along with Carbon.

Another benefit to using a package manager is the update management. With a simple command, you are able to update all the packages in your project to ensure you have the latest files.

Lastly, a package manager saves time. It is an effective and efficient method for managing dependencies.

What will we use?

As a part of your local development environment, you will be installing:

• Composer – dependency manager for PHP
• Node Package Manager (npm) – package manager for JavaScript
• Bower – package manager for front-end development