Backend and Infrastructure

The Wonderful World of Composer

Check your version

This tutorial covers a topic in which may or may not be the version you're using. We're keeping this tutorial online as a courtesy to users of , but we consider it archived.

Alternate resources

Sprout Video

Welcome to the wonderful world of Composer, the Dependency Manager for PHP! In this tutorial, you'll learn how to install and configure Composer and use it to integrate third-party libraries into any PHP project. We'll walk through:

  • How Composer makes sharing awesome again
  • Downloading the composer.phar file
  • Creating the composer.json file
  • Installing the external libraries
  • Handling autoloading
  • Understanding the composer.lock file
  • The update versus install command
  • The require command
  • Storing in version control

Additional resources

Also, check out our topic page on Composer for even more resources.