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Composer

Score6 out of 10

3 Reviews and Ratings

What is Composer?

Composer is a dependency manager for PHP that simplifies the management of libraries and dependencies in PHP projects. It is designed to cater to the needs of web developers, software engineers, PHP developers, IT professionals, and e-commerce companies. According to the vendor, Composer offers a comprehensive solution for managing dependencies in PHP projects, making it suitable for businesses of various sizes.

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Categories & Use Cases

Composer Reviews

What users are saying about Composer.
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Composer is your "must have" dependency manager

Incentivized
Leandro ChavesView profile
Desenvolvedor de software in Information Technology at Nerdsoft (201-500 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Composer helps us dealing with dependencies for all our projects. It automates the boring proccess of reviewing if all the dependencies are right placed/insert into a project and allows us to fastly inject any other dependecy in a project.

Pros

  • Controlling dependencies
  • Fast dependency resolver
  • Easy to use dependency injection

Cons

  • Documentation can de improved

Most Important Features

  • Controlling dependencies
  • Giving agility to software development

Return on Investment

  • Composer only has had positive impacts in our business. It saves a lot of time and resource in order to develop a software.

Other Software Used

PhpStorm, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Docker

If you use PHP, you NEED composer now !

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Composer, and its indexes, packagist.org, and packagist.com (the entreprise edition of packagist.org) extensively to manage our reusable PHP modules and dependencies inside the company.
Most of our PHP projects contain only a composer.json file, which will reference external modules indexed inside Packagist, and composer is then used to fetch these dependencies at build, using the command line "composer install"

Pros

  • Dependencies management and their lifecycles
  • Composer command line is very flexible and easy to use
  • Branch and Tags for release management of the dependencies

Cons

  • Sometimes a bit slow, but v2 made a lot of improvements on that
  • If everything is modular, setting up a local dev environment is a bit trickier than having everything in the same repo
  • Might be hard to adopt with some frameworks which have not fully embraced it, like Wordpress

Most Important Features

  • Modules and dependency management for all PHP projects
  • Awareness of git tagging and branching when making internal modules
  • Ease of use inside our CI/CD pipelines, for building, testing and deploying

Return on Investment

  • Helped us reduce the TTM of our ecommerce factory by about 40% since we adopted it
  • Code re-usability became the norm, and thus much shorter development cycles
  • New websites go live much faster, and thus cost way less money to make when reusing composer modules (SSO, CRM integration, modules to call Internal APIs ...)

Alternatives Considered

npm and Yarn

Other Software Used

Magento Open Source, GitLab, Laravel PHP Framework