» Composer is a dependency manager for PHP that makes it possible to define third-party code packages used by a project that can then be easily installed and updated. It leverages the built-in class autoloading features of PHP, repositories of PHP packages such as » Packagist, and common project layout and coding conventions.
For example, if a PHP application or website needs
to work with UUID values,
» Ben Ramsey's
ramsey/uuid package that implements the
widely known and used types of UUIDs that are defined by
» RFC 4122 could be used.
Briefly, this is done by creating a composer.json
in the project, using Composer to install the latest version of the
package, and including Composer's autoload script to make it available
to the code. The » Composer
"Basic Usage" documentation goes into this in more depth.
Example #1
composer.json that requires a single package
{
"require": {
"ramsey/uuid": "^4.7"
}
}