composer/doc/articles/handling-private-packages-with-satis.md

Handling private packages

Private Packagist

Private Packagist is a commercial package hosting product offering professional support and web based management of private and public packages, and granular access permissions. Private Packagist provides mirroring for packages' zip files which makes installs faster and independent from third party systems - e.g. you can deploy even if GitHub is down because your zip files are mirrored.

Private Packagist is available as a hosted SaaS solution or as an on-premise self-hosted package, providing an easy interactive set up experience.

Some of Private Packagist's revenue is used to pay for Composer and Packagist.org development and hosting so using it is a good way to support the maitenance of these open source projects financially. You can find more information about how to set up your own package archive on Packagist.com.

Satis

Satis on the other hand is open source but only a static composer repository generator. It is a bit like an ultra-lightweight, static file-based version of packagist and can be used to host the metadata of your company's private packages, or your own. You can get it from GitHub or install via CLI:

php composer.phar create-project composer/satis --stability=dev --keep-vcs

Setup

For example let's assume you have a few packages you want to reuse across your company but don't really want to open-source. You would first define a Satis configuration: a json file with an arbitrary name that lists your curated repositories.

Here is an example configuration, you see that it holds a few VCS repositories, but those could be any types of repositories. Then it uses "require-all": true which selects all versions of all packages in the repositories you defined.

The default file Satis looks for is satis.json in the root of the repository.

{
  "name": "My Repository",
  "homepage": "http://packages.example.org",
  "repositories": [
    { "type": "vcs", "url": "https://github.com/mycompany/privaterepo" },
    { "type": "vcs", "url": "http://svn.example.org/private/repo" },
    { "type": "vcs", "url": "https://github.com/mycompany/privaterepo2" }
  ],
  "require-all": true
}

If you want to cherry pick which packages you want, you can list all the packages you want to have in your satis repository inside the classic composer require key, using a "*" constraint to make sure all versions are selected, or another constraint if you want really specific versions.

{
  "repositories": [
    { "type": "vcs", "url": "https://github.com/mycompany/privaterepo" },
    { "type": "vcs", "url": "http://svn.example.org/private/repo" },
    { "type": "vcs", "url": "https://github.com/mycompany/privaterepo2" }
  ],
  "require": {
    "company/package": "*",
    "company/package2": "*",
    "company/package3": "2.0.0"
  }
}

Once you've done this, you just run:

php bin/satis build <configuration file> <build dir>

When you ironed out that process, what you would typically do is run this command as a cron job on a server. It would then update all your package info much like Packagist does.

Note that if your private packages are hosted on GitHub, your server should have an ssh key that gives it access to those packages, and then you should add the --no-interaction (or -n) flag to the command to make sure it falls back to ssh key authentication instead of prompting for a password. This is also a good trick for continuous integration servers.

Set up a virtual-host that points to that web/ directory, let's say it is packages.example.org. Alternatively, with PHP >= 5.4.0, you can use the built-in CLI server php -S localhost:port -t satis-output-dir/ for a temporary solution.

Partial Updates

You can tell Satis to selectively update only particular packages or process only a repository with a given URL. This cuts down the time it takes to rebuild the package.json file and is helpful if you use (custom) webhooks to trigger rebuilds whenever code is pushed into one of your repositories.

To rebuild only particular packages, pass the package names on the command line like so:

php bin/satis build satis.json web/ this/package that/other-package

Note that this will still need to pull and scan all of your VCS repositories because any VCS repository might contain (on any branch) one of the selected packages.

If you want to scan only a single repository and update all packages found in it, pass the VCS repository URL as an optional argument:

php bin/satis build --repository-url https://only.my/repo.git satis.json web/

Usage

In your projects all you need to add now is your own composer repository using the packages.example.org as URL, then you can require your private packages and everything should work smoothly. You don't need to copy all your repositories in every project anymore. Only that one unique repository that will update itself.

{
  "repositories": [ { "type": "composer", "url": "http://packages.example.org/" } ],
  "require": {
    "company/package": "1.2.0",
    "company/package2": "1.5.2",
    "company/package3": "dev-master"
  }
}

Security

To secure your private repository you can host it over SSH or SSL using a client certificate. In your project you can use the options parameter to specify the connection options for the server.

Example using a custom repository using SSH (requires the SSH2 PECL extension):

{
  "repositories": [{
    "type": "composer",
    "url": "ssh2.sftp://example.org",
    "options": {
      "ssh2": {
        "username": "composer",
        "pubkey_file": "/home/composer/.ssh/id_rsa.pub",
        "privkey_file": "/home/composer/.ssh/id_rsa"
      }
    }
  }]
}

Tip: See ssh2 context options for more information.

Example using HTTP over SSL using a client certificate:

{
  "repositories": [{
     "type": "composer",
     "url": "https://example.org",
     "options": {
       "ssl": {
         "local_cert": "/home/composer/.ssl/composer.pem"
       }
     }
  }]
}

Tip: See ssl context options for more information.

Example using a custom HTTP Header field for token authentication:

{
  "repositories": [{
    "type": "composer",
    "url": "https://example.org",
    "options":  {
      "http": {
        "header": [
          "API-TOKEN: YOUR-API-TOKEN"
        ]
      }
    }
  }]
}

Authentication

When your private repositories are password protected, you can store the authentication details permanently. The first time Composer needs to authenticate against some domain it will prompt you for a username/password and then you will be asked whether you want to store it.

The storage can be done either globally in the COMPOSER_HOME/auth.json file (COMPOSER_HOME defaults to ~/.composer or %APPDATA%/Composer on Windows) or also in the project directory directly sitting besides your composer.json.

You can also configure these by hand using the config command if you need to configure a production machine to be able to run non-interactive installs. For example to enter credentials for example.org one could type:

composer config http-basic.example.org username password

That will store it in the current directory's auth.json, but if you want it available globally you can use the --global (-g) flag.

Downloads

When GitHub or BitBucket repositories are mirrored on your local satis, the build process will include the location of the downloads these platforms make available. This means that the repository and your setup depend on the availability of these services.

At the same time, this implies that all code which is hosted somewhere else (on another service or for example in Subversion) will not have downloads available and thus installations usually take a lot longer.

To enable your satis installation to create downloads for all (Git, Mercurial and Subversion) your packages, add the following to your satis.json:

{
  "archive": {
    "directory": "dist",
    "format": "tar",
    "prefix-url": "https://amazing.cdn.example.org",
    "skip-dev": true
  }
}

Options explained

• directory: required, the location of the dist files (inside the output-dir)
• format: optional, zip (default) or tar
• prefix-url: optional, location of the downloads, homepage (from satis.json) followed by directory by default
• skip-dev: optional, false by default, when enabled (true) satis will not create downloads for branches
• absolute-directory: optional, a local directory where the dist files are dumped instead of output-dir/directory
• whitelist: optional, if set as a list of package names, satis will only dump the dist files of these packages
• blacklist: optional, if set as a list of package names, satis will not dump the dist files of these packages
• checksum: optional, true by default, when disabled (false) satis will not provide the sha1 checksum for the dist files

Once enabled, all downloads (include those from GitHub and BitBucket) will be replaced with a local version.

prefix-url

Prefixing the URL with another host is especially helpful if the downloads end up in a private Amazon S3 bucket or on a CDN host. A CDN would drastically improve download times and therefore package installation.

Example: A prefix-url of https://my-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com (and directory set to dist) creates download URLs which look like the following: https://my-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/dist/vendor-package-version-ref.zip.

Web outputs

• output-html: optional, true by default, when disabled (false) satis will not generate the output-dir/index.html page.
• twig-template: optional, a path to a personalized Twig template for the output-dir/index.html page.

Abandoned packages

To enable your satis installation to indicate that some packages are abandoned, add the following to your satis.json:

{
  "abandoned": {
    "company/package": true,
    "company/package2": "company/newpackage"
  }
}

The true value indicates that the package is truly abandoned while the "company/newpackage" value specifies that the package is replaced by the company/newpackage package.

Note that all packages set as abandoned in their own composer.json file will be marked abandoned as well.

Resolving dependencies

It is possible to make satis automatically resolve and add all dependencies for your projects. This can be used with the Downloads functionality to have a complete local mirror of packages. Just add the following to your satis.json:

{
  "require-dependencies": true,
  "require-dev-dependencies": true
}

When searching for packages, satis will attempt to resolve all the required packages from the listed repositories. Therefore, if you are requiring a package from Packagist, you will need to define it in your satis.json.

Dev dependencies are packaged only if the require-dev-dependencies parameter is set to true.

Other options

• providers: optional, false by default, when enabled (true) each package will be dumped into a separate include file which will be only loaded by composer when the package is really required. Speeds up composer handling for repositories with huge number of packages like f.i. packagist.
• output-dir: optional, defines where to output the repository files if not provided as an argument when calling the build command.
• config: optional, lets you define all config options from composer, except archive-format and archive-dir as the configuration is done through archive instead. See docs on config schema for more details.
• notify-batch: optional, specify a URL that will be called every time a user installs a package. See notify-batch.