Jump Start PHP Environment

Chapter 7Composer

This chapter deals exclusively with Composer, the PHP package manager. If you’re familiar with the tool, feel free to move onto the next chapter.

Spaghetti Western

Let’s talk about what led to the development of Composer in the first place.

Back when PHP was first created, a “web application” consisted of individual files of PHP code which, when used in the right order, solved many of what was then modern web development problems (submitting forms, writing to the database, and so on). If you had a file called file-a.php with a specific bit of logic and file-b.php with more logic, and you wanted to use them both, you would include them in yet another file, file-c.php.

For example, say file-a.php has the code:

<?php $word1 = "Hello"; ...