New PHP packages are usually developed in parallel with larger projects. However, it’s often inconvenient to publish an unfinished package in order to require it as a dependency in your project’s composer.json.
Here’s how you can require a local composer package in a local project, allowing you to continue development until it’s ready for publication. We’ll have two separate project folders; package and project:
{
"name": "jamesmcfadden/package",
"description": "My package",
"license": "MIT",
"authors": [
{
"name": "James McFadden",
"email": "[email protected]"
}
],
"autoload": {
"psr-4": {
"App\\": "src"
}
},
"require": {
"nesbot/carbon": "~1.21"
}
}
Here we have a simple composer.json which defines our package and a single dependency nesbot/carbon. We’re using the PSR-4 autoloader specification, so ensure your project is structured accordingly. Next we’ll reference our package as a dependency in our project.
{
"name": "jamesmcfadden/project",
"description": "New project",
"license": "MIT",
"authors": [
{
"name": "James McFadden",
"email": "[email protected]"
}
],
"repositories": [
{
"type": "path",
"url": "/path/to/jamesmcfadden/package"
}
],
"require": {
"jamesmcfadden/package": "dev-master"
}
}
The key part of our project’s composer.json is repositories; this defines our package as a path, which means we are able to reference a location on our local machine. We include it in our require section as we would usually.
We can now run composer install in our project root. Our development package will be installed to our /vendor directory as a symlink (by default, if possible). This is great, as it means we can make changes to our package without needing to run composer update in our project after each change! Note that any changes to your package composer.json, however, will require a composer update for the changes to take effect, as usual.
When your package is finished and published to a package repository such as Packagist, all thats left to do is switch out/remove your repositories section and update your dependencies as appropriate. For example:
{
"name": "jamesmcfadden/project",
"description": "New project",
"license": "MIT",
"authors": [
{
"name": "James McFadden",
"email": "[email protected]"
}
],
"require": {
"jamesmcfadden/publishedpackage": "1.0.0"
}
}