If you use PHP, you NEED composer now !
Rating: 8 out of 10
IncentivizedUse 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
Likelihood to Recommend
I do highly recommend it whenever you have some PHP projects, especially if you need to have reusable modules that you want to share across teams. With a good branching an tagging strategy, you can go a long way in making your developers' life easier. They will only need to work on the modules that are of interest of them, and not have to touch the whole codebase.
Also, it's quite necessary if you are planning to use community PHP modules, as the vast majority of them is distributed, and versionned via packagist.org, and thus via composer.
Vetted Review
6 years of experience