PHP is a powerful backend programming language for web app development. It is also the most popular.
If you have ever developed in PHP, you know that your work could quickly become tedious.
For every function, you want to use, say for Database connection, or user authentication PHP requires coding.
PHP libraries introduced to remove the burden unnecessary and repetitive coding.
In PHP libraries, multiple functions configured and added to a project effortlessly, and developers can focus on the development of the other operations.
PHP Frameworks, such as Laravel, Symphony, and Zend, provide you with many mature libraries, which you can use in your code.
By adding new libraries to your PHP code, you have dependencies.
If your code uses multiple libraries, or rather the dependencies, you need to manage the dependencies.
Enter the Composer!
Composer is a PHP tool to manage project dependencies.
You declare the libraries or packages that your project depends on, and Composer manages them for you (install/update).
Composer manages libraries (aka packages) on a project-wide basis, by installing them in a directory inside your project. Composer does not install anything globally. npm in Node and Bundler in Ruby is the inspiration behind Composer.
Composer is not a package manager, like Yum and Apt. When you install a package by using npm, it’s system-wide, but Composer manages libraries at the project level.
For example, suppose you have a PHP project. Your project has library dependencies, and some of the libraries depend on other libraries.
In this case, Composer Enables you to declare the libraries you depend on, and it finds the correct version of each package that your project needs, and installs them (it downloads them into your project).
When it comes to updating your code dependencies, Composer updates all of them in one command.
System requirements
Composer works on PHP 5.3.2+. It also relies on other settings. Composer installer examines your php.ini system file for any incompatibility before installation.
Installation
The easiest way to install Composer on your Windows machine is to download Composer-Setup.exe and run it.
For more information and learn how to install Composer on Linux, Unix, and Mac OS, see this.
Last Word
Composer is the best tool for any PHP developer to have in his toolbox.
Popular PHP frameworks use Composer, and many more independent developers release libraries that are Composer-ready.
Composer makes PHP an even more favorable server-side programming language while it helps developers to code faster, cleaner, and much more manageably.
Kourosh
