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Repositories
This chapter will explain the concept of packages and repositories, what kinds of repositories are available, and how they work.
Concepts
Before we look at the different types of repositories that we can have, we need to understand some of the basic concepts that composer is built on.
Package
Composer is a dependency manager. It installs packages. A package is essentially just a directory containing something. In this case it is PHP code, but in theory it could be anything. And it contains a package description which has a name and a version. The name and the version are used to identify the package.
In fact, internally composer sees every version as a separate package. While this distinction does not matter when you are using composer, it's quite important when you want to change it.
In addition to the name and the version, there is useful data. The only really important piece of information is the package source, that describes where to get the package contents. The package data points to the contents of the package. And there are two options here: dist and source.
Dist: The dist is a packaged version of the package data. Usually a released version, usually a stable release.
Source: The source is used for development. This will usually originate from a source code repository, such as git. You can fetch this when you want to modify the downloaded package.
Packages can supply either of these, or even both. Depending on certain factors, such as user-supplied options and stability of the package, one will be preferred.
Repository
A repository is a package source. It's a list of packages, of which you can pick some to install.
You can also add more repositories to your project by declaring them in composer.json.
Types
Composer
The main repository type is the composer repository. It uses a single packages.json file that contains all of the package metadata. The JSON format is as follows:
{
"vendor/packageName": {
"name": "vendor/packageName",
"description": "Package description",
"versions": {
"master-dev": { @composer.json },
"1.0.0": { @composer.json }
}
}
}
The @composer.json is the composer.json of that package version including as a minimum:
- name
- version
- dist or source
Here is a minimal package definition:
{
"name": "smarty/smarty",
"version": "3.1.7",
"dist": {
"url": "http://www.smarty.net/files/Smarty-3.1.7.zip",
"type": "zip"
}
}
It may include any of the other fields specified in the [schema].
The composer repository is also what packagist uses. To reference a composer repository, just supply the path before the packages.json file. In case of packagist, that file is located at /packages.json, so the URL of the repository would be http://packagist.org. For http://example.org/packages.org the repository URL would be http://example.org.