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If you use PHP, you NEED composer now !
Updated June 22, 2022

If you use PHP, you NEED composer now !

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Composer

We use Composer, and its indexes, packagist.org, and packagist.com (the entreprise edition of packagist.org) extensively to manage our reusable PHP modules and dependencies inside the company.
Most of our PHP projects contain only a composer.json file, which will reference external modules indexed inside Packagist, and composer is then used to fetch these dependencies at build, using the command line "composer install"
  • Dependencies management and their lifecycles
  • Composer command line is very flexible and easy to use
  • Branch and Tags for release management of the dependencies
  • Sometimes a bit slow, but v2 made a lot of improvements on that
  • If everything is modular, setting up a local dev environment is a bit trickier than having everything in the same repo
  • Might be hard to adopt with some frameworks which have not fully embraced it, like Wordpress
  • Modules and dependency management for all PHP projects
  • Awareness of git tagging and branching when making internal modules
  • Ease of use inside our CI/CD pipelines, for building, testing and deploying
  • Helped us reduce the TTM of our ecommerce factory by about 40% since we adopted it
  • Code re-usability became the norm, and thus much shorter development cycles
  • New websites go live much faster, and thus cost way less money to make when reusing composer modules (SSO, CRM integration, modules to call Internal APIs ...)
If you're familiar with npm or Yarn, you'll feel right at home with composer. The work in pretty much the same way. You can use a composer.json file in your repo to reference specific version of public community modules, and enterprise internal ones. You can also hook some scripts that you would want to execute, like for testing, building your code ...

Do you think Composer delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Composer's feature set?

Yes

Did Composer live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Composer go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Composer again?

Yes

I do highly recommend it whenever you have some PHP projects, especially if you need to have reusable modules that you want to share across teams. With a good branching an tagging strategy, you can go a long way in making your developers' life easier. They will only need to work on the modules that are of interest of them, and not have to touch the whole codebase.
Also, it's quite necessary if you are planning to use community PHP modules, as the vast majority of them is distributed, and versionned via packagist.org, and thus via composer.