If you are a web designer or working on the CSS on your website,= this page contains is all you need to know about Composer.

Composer is an opensource PHP packaging system to manage dependen= cies.

This makes it easy to adapt package installs and updates to your workflo= w, allowing you to test new/updated packages in a development environment, = put the changes in your version control system (git, Subversion, Mercurial,= etc.), pull in those changes on a staging environment and, when approved, = put it in production.

Troubleshooting
You may experience some latency in dependency resolution: everything is = going normally.

If you are interested by the process, do your Composer commands with the= `--verbose` option activated.

Option `verbo= se -v`

Increase the verbosity of messages: 1 for normal output, 2 for more verb= ose output and 3 for debug.

Usage:

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php -d memory_limit=3D-1 composer.phar <command> --verbo=
se (-v|vv|vvv)

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Useful commands

install

The install command reads the composer.lock file from the c= urrent directory, processes it, and downloads and installs all the librarie= s and dependencies outlined in that file. If the file does not exist it wil= l look for composer.json and do the same.

Usage

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php -d memory_limit=3D-1 composer.phar install --dry-run --pre=
fer-dist

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In this example the dry-run option is mentioned to prevent = you from doing anything critical. (This option outputs the operations but w= ill not execute anything and implicitly enables the verbose mode).

Do= cumentation with complete usage:

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php -d memory_limit=3D-1 composer.phar install [--prefer-sourc=
e] [--prefer-dist] [--dry-run] [--dev] [--no-dev] [--no-plugins] [--no-cust=
om-installers] [--no-scripts] [--no-progress] [-v|vv|vvv|--verbose] [-o|--o=
ptimize-autoloader] [packages1] ... [packagesN]

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update

The update command reads the composer.json file from = the current directory, processes it, and updates, removes or installs all t= he dependencies.

Interesting op= tions:

To limit the update operation to a few packages, you can list the packag= e(s) you want to update as such:

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php -d memory_limit=3D-1 composer.phar update vendor/package1 =
foo/mypackage

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You may also use an asterisk (*) pattern to limit the update opera= tion to package(s) from a specific vendor:

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php -d memory_limit=3D-1 composer.phar update vendor/package1 =
foo/*

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Composer for Frontend Developers

Troubleshooting You may experience some latency in dependency resolution: everything is = going normally. If you are interested by the process, do your Composer commands with the= --verbose option activated.

Option verbo= se -v