Libraries

This chapter will tell you how to make your library installable through Composer.

Every project is a package

As soon as you have a composer.json in a directory, that directory is a package. When you add a require to a project, you are making a package that depends on other packages. The only difference between your project and a library is that your project is a package without a name.

In order to make that package installable you need to give it a name. You do this by adding the name property in composer.json:

{
    "name": "acme/hello-world",
    "require": {
        "monolog/monolog": "1.0.*"
    }
}

In this case the project name is acme/hello-world, where acme is the vendor name. Supplying a vendor name is mandatory.

Note: If you don't know what to use as a vendor name, your GitHub username is usually a good bet. While package names are case insensitive, the convention is all lowercase and dashes for word separation.

Library Versioning

In the vast majority of cases, you will be maintaining your library using some sort of version control system like git, svn, hg or fossil. In these cases, Composer infers versions from your VCS and you should not specify a version in your composer.json file. (See the Versions article to learn about how Composer uses VCS branches and tags to resolve version constraints.)

If you are maintaining packages by hand (i.e., without a VCS), you'll need to specify the version explicitly by adding a version value in your composer.json file:

{
    "version": "1.0.0"
}

Note: When you add a hardcoded version to a VCS, the version will conflict with tag names. Composer will not be able to determine the version number.

VCS Versioning

Composer uses your VCS's branch and tag features to resolve the version constraints you specify in your require field to specific sets of files. When determining valid available versions, Composer looks at all of your tags and branches and translates their names into an internal list of options that it then matches against the version constraint you provided.

For more on how Composer treats tags and branches and how it resolves package version constraints, read the versions article.

Lock file

For your library you may commit the composer.lock file if you want to. This can help your team to always test against the same dependency versions. However, this lock file will not have any effect on other projects that depend on it. It only has an effect on the main project.

If you do not want to commit the lock file and you are using git, add it to the .gitignore.

Publishing to a VCS

Once you have a VCS repository (version control system, e.g. git) containing a composer.json file, your library is already composer-installable. In this example we will publish the acme/hello-world library on GitHub under github.com/username/hello-world.

Now, to test installing the acme/hello-world package, we create a new project locally. We will call it acme/blog. This blog will depend on acme/hello-world, which in turn depends on monolog/monolog. We can accomplish this by creating a new blog directory somewhere, containing a composer.json:

{
    "name": "acme/blog",
    "require": {
        "acme/hello-world": "dev-master"
    }
}

The name is not needed in this case, since we don't want to publish the blog as a library. It is added here to clarify which composer.json is being described.

Now we need to tell the blog app where to find the hello-world dependency. We do this by adding a package repository specification to the blog's composer.json:

{
    "name": "acme/blog",
    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "vcs",
            "url": "https://github.com/username/hello-world"
        }
    ],
    "require": {
        "acme/hello-world": "dev-master"
    }
}

For more details on how package repositories work and what other types are available, see Repositories.

That's all. You can now install the dependencies by running Composer's install command!

Recap: Any git/svn/hg/fossil repository containing a composer.json can be added to your project by specifying the package repository and declaring the dependency in the require field.

Publishing to packagist

Alright, so now you can publish packages. But specifying the VCS repository every time is cumbersome. You don't want to force all your users to do that.

The other thing that you may have noticed is that we did not specify a package repository for monolog/monolog. How did that work? The answer is Packagist.

Packagist is the main package repository for Composer, and it is enabled by default. Anything that is published on Packagist is available automatically through Composer. Since Monolog is on Packagist, we can depend on it without having to specify any additional repositories.

If we wanted to share hello-world with the world, we would publish it on Packagist as well. Doing so is really easy.

You simply visit Packagist and hit the "Submit" button. This will prompt you to sign up if you haven't already, and then allows you to submit the URL to your VCS repository, at which point Packagist will start crawling it. Once it is done, your package will be available to anyone!

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