Laravel and non-composer-ised libraries

Composer has changed the way PHP is used, distributed and shared. It provides a way to easily manage dependencies and keep them up-to-date through the main package provider, Packagist, where anyone can register their package free, for everyone to access, but this is still a relatively new concept for PHP, so what if the package you want to use isn't available through packagist?

There are a few ways you can go about adding non-composer-ised packages, both methods assume the package you want to use is object-orientated, but hey object-orientated methods have been around for over 50 years, so I'd hope we're finally there.

Repositories

Composer can fetch dependencies from pretty-much anywhere, be it a git repo, svn, hg, pear package or even a zip file. If its hosted on the internet composer can probably manage it.

Update: Using this method requires the repository to contain a valid composer.json file. If the repository you want to use does not contain a valid composer.json file you can use the Packages method found below

Using the example below we'll add zizaco/confide to our composer.json. Although this package is available through Packagist I'm just using this as a example.

{
  "repositories": [
    {
      "name": "some-vendor/package",
      "type": "git",
      "url": "https://github.com/Zizaco/confide.git"
    }
  ]
}

You can then add "some-vendor/package" to the require section of your composer.json, as you would with any other package. Composer will then work its magic, keeping this package up-to-date every time you composer update. This repo will be treated just like every other composer dependency and will stored in your vendor directory.

Check out the documentation here.

Autoloading

But what if the package you want to use isn't available through a repo or you simply want to use one of your own libraries without bothering to setup a packagist repo for it, Simple!

Create a directory for your libraries, app/libraries is one often used with Laravel, but can be anything you like. Move your code into this directory and configure your composer.json as shown below.

{
  "autoload": {
    "classmap": [
      "app/libraries/YourLibrary.php"
    ]
  }
}

Alternatively if your library is comprised of many classes you can just supply a directory to the classmap, app/libraries/package. Composer will then automagically load all of your classes ready for you to use throughout your application.

Having some issues? Drop a comment bellow and I'll reply asap.

Update

A recent update to composer means using repositories requires a valid composer.json file to be located in the file store, so what if the repository you want to use doesn't contain a composer.json?

"repositories": [
  {
    "type": "package",
    "package": {
      "name": "nnnick/Chartjs",
      "version": "dev-master",
      "source": {
        "type": "git",
        "url": "https://github.com/nnnick/Chart.js.git",
        "reference": "origin/master"
      }
    }
  }
]