Packager

Run Composer commands and execute Composer searches and queries within a PHP application. This library acts as a PHP wrapper for Composer commands, allowing package management through PHP, and uses a combination of Composer, the Packagist API and your own project lockfile to derive information about the packages installed or available.

You technically do not need Composer to be installed, as this library will bring in the Composer application as a dependency - however, you will need Composer to install this library itself.

Use case

This library was written initially to provide Composer usage through PHP for Winter CMS, to power its upgrade and plugin architecture. A portion of the Winter CMS user-base prefer web-based installation methods and prefer not to (or simply can't) use the command-line Composer application.

This library therefore leverages the power of Composer in maintaining dependencies and does so in a way that can be programatically controlled and presented in a friendlier format for these users.

Installation

Install via Composer:

composer require winter/packager

Usage

This library currently provides support for the following Composer commands:

• install
• search
• show
• update
• version (--version)

You can create a Composer instance in your PHP script and run these commands like so, defining a working directory which contains a composer.json file, and a home directory in which cached packages are stored.

<?php
use Winter\Packager\Composer;

$composer = new Composer();
$composer
    ->setWorkDir('/home/me/project/')
    ->setHomeDir('/tmp/composer');

// Get the Composer version
$version = $composer->version();

// Run an install or update on the entire project, including dev dependencies
$install = $composer->install();
$update = $composer->update();

// Install project without dev dependencies
$install = $composer->install(false);

// Show installed packages
$show = $composer->show();

// Search packages
$results =

Documentation on each command will be forthcoming soon.

Limitations

• Composer uses symfony/process under the hood for various actions. Most shared hosts will not allow this work, by blocking either the proc_* functions or the pcntl extension. If this is the case for your host, you will be unable to use scripts or some plugins.

Security Implications

Note that this library does introduce some security implications which you may need to consider before using.

• If this library is used in a web-based environment, you must make the vendor folder and files writable for the user running your web server. You should not make your vendor folder web-accessible, otherwise this will become an easy vector for an attack.
• Allowing scripts to run within Composer may grant the script access to your web environment or outlying PHP application. You should not run scripts unless you absolutely trust your dependencies.

Special thanks

• The Composer team
• User "Endel" from Stack Overflow, for this answer which served as the inspiration for this library.