Install Composer PHP Dependency Manager – Mac Users

In this lab, you will install Composer, the PHP Dependency Manager, onto your Mac. We use Composer in our library videos for the basic plugin which includes Kint and Whoops. In your projects, you will use Composer to package up your project as well as load and manage dependencies for you and autoload your files.

Composer serves two purposes in your projects:

• Dependency management for PHP
• File autoloading

Dependency Management for PHP

Using Composer, you can specify production and/or development packages which are stored locally in your project’s assets/vendor folder. Running an update will update all of the packages specified in the composer file.

File autoloading

For Object Oriented Programming (OOP), Composer allows us to specify the location of the class files. Then, the files are automatically loaded when an object is instantiated. Instead of having include() or require() within your code, Composer abstracts away the file loading process. The result is clean, purposeful code.

It’s Time to Install Composer

Open your browser and navigate to https://getcomposer.org.

Step 1:

Go to Download Composer installer page. At the top of the page, simply copy and paste the code they provide into terminal. This code does the following for you:

• Downloads the installer onto your machine.
• Runs it.
• Then it removes it.

Step 2:

Return to the Global installation page. You need to follow the instructions here by copying mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer into your terminal. You may get a few errors. Let’s talk about those.

Permissions error

If you get a permissions error, then you need to run with sudo, like this: sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer. Then enter your password.

Directory does not exist

If you get an error that the /usrmkdir -p /usr/local/bin. You may have to add sudo at the start of it though if you get a permissions error: sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin.

Try it out

When complete, type composer. If you receive a list of commands, Composer is properly installed on your machine.

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Updating and Uninstalling Composer

Before updating, you should check the current version of Composer on your local machine. To do this, type into your terminal application:

composer –-version or

composer -V

 

Update

Update dependencies:

Since Composer manages the updates of your dependencies, it is possible for you to update the dependencies with the command below:

composer update

If you do not currently have any active projects with dependencies managed by Composer in your working directory, then Composer will let you know it was unable to find a composer.json file.

Update Composer:

To update Composer itself, you should run the command:

sudo composer self-update

This will run the update script for composer. Once it has completed the update, you will see something similar to the following:

And that is all there is to updating Composer and its dependencies.

 

Uninstall

Uninstall packages

To uninstall packages in Composer, run

composer remove <package-name>

Make sure to remove the “< >” from around the package name. This will uninstall the package.