As I noted in an earlier post about my switch from CodeIgniter to FuelPHP, I have since started moving much of my development from FuelPHP to Laravel. Most recently I have been using Laravel 4 and have become acquainted and infatuated with Composer packages. Composer is bringing the package functionality that PHP needs and PEAR can’t possibly deliver to the current PHP community. Unfortunately, the current version (1.4 as I write this) of FuelPHP doesn’t have Composer baked in yet. The beauty of Composer is that installing it into an application is so simple that this is no longer a barrier.

Note: FuelPHP 2.0, which is major milestone and change for FuelPHP, will supposedly include Composer. There is talk of a 1.x version including Composer in order to bridge the gap between the current releases and the much changed 2.0 release.

Setting Up Composer to Work With FuelPHP 1.x

1) Download Composer. Although obvious, this is a necessary step. I find that command line installation is easiest. Navigate to the root directory of your application and run the following code:

curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

2) At this point you should have a composer.phar file installed in your application’s root directory. The next step is telling Composer what packages you want to add to your project. Composer uses a file named composer.json, so create this file in the root directory. The most basic example is laid out below, but look for more examples and information in the Composer documentation.

{
     "config": {
        "vendor-dir": "fuel/app/vendor"
     },
     "require": {
        "monolog/monolog": "1.2.*"
     }
}

3) Now that we have the composer.phar file and a composer.json file with the packages we need, run the composer installation, which will download the packages and place them in the vendor directory specified in composer.json (in this case the default fuel vendor directory).

php composer.phar install

4) Once the installation has finished (may take some time, depending on the number of packages you have) we can assume that all packages are installed to the fuel/app/vendor directory and now we need to tell FuelPHP to look at this directory for our new packages.
Open your bootstrap file (fuel/app/bootstrap.php) and add the following code after the AutoLoader::register() that is already there:

require APPPATH.'vendor/autoload.php';

At this point you have finished the setup and installation of Composer.
The next step is to read the Composer getting started guide to make sure you’re up to speed with how it works.
The basics you will need to know right off the bat:

  • php composer.phar update – this command will update all your packages to the latest version based on criteria specified in your composer.json file.
  • php composer.phar dump-autoload – run this command whenever you add or remove packages so your autoload.php file can be updated.