Lesser known Composer tricks and tips you should know
The Composer dependency manager is currently the de-facto way of managing dependencies in your PHP projects. All the modern PHP development can’t be imagined without Composer. But do you know there are a lot of things that you can do with Composer other than just installing and updating dependencies?
That’s right! I’m going to enlist such features in this article that you might be unaware of Composer and can help you improve your Composer workflow.
- List all the installed dependencies of the project
- Get information about a certain package
- Navigate to package’s GitHub repository/Homepage
- Validate
composer.json - Find outdated packages
- Get funding information of all the packages
- Self update the Composer from Composer
- In closing
List all the installed dependencies of the project
Using the show command of the Composer, you can get the list of all the packages installed in the project or all your repositories in the following format.
$ composer show
# List the packages that are installed (this is enabled by default, and deprecated).
$ composer show --all
# List all packages available in all your repositories.
This can come in handy when you want to take an overview of which all kinds of dependencies your project is using.
Get information about a certain package
Using the same show command you can get the information about a certain package. For instance, if you want to get information about spatie/laravel-web-tinker package, you can do it like so.
$ composer show spatie/laravel-web-tinker
The command will fetch the details from the package’s composer.json file and presents in a nice and readable way like so.
You can even get the information about the certain package version, which will only tell you the details of that specific version like so.
$ composer show spatie/laravel-web-tinker 1.0.0
Navigate to package’s GitHub repository/Homepage
Using the browse command, you navigate to the package’s repository URL or homepage in your browser.
$ composer browse spatie/laravel-web-tinker
# Navigate to package's repository URL
$ composer browse spatie/laravel-web-tinker --homepage
# Navigate to package's homepage
$ composer browse spatie/laravel-web-tinker --show
# Only show the homepage or repository URL
Validate composer.json
You can validate your project’s composer.json which helps find issues with your composer.json (if there are any).
$ composer validate
For instance, when I ran the command in my project, I got the following output with few issues such as using dev-master as a version for certain packages which should be avoided.
Find outdated packages
If you’re keeping all your dependencies latest, you can keep a check on outdated dependencies using an outdated command like so.
$ composer outdated
It will list all the outdated dependencies like composer show with the following color coding:
- green (=): Dependency is in the latest version and is up to date.
- yellow (~): Dependency has a new version available that includes backward compatibility breaks according to semver, so upgrade when you can but it may involve work.
- red (!): Dependency has a new version that is semver-compatible and you should upgrade it.
Get funding information of all the packages
If you’re ever interested in funding/donating to your favorite packages, you can get all the funding links from the installed dependencies of your project using the fund command.
$ composer fund
It will show all the funding details like so.
Self update the Composer from Composer
Lastly, you can even update the composer to the latest from the composer itself. To update Composer itself to the latest version, run the self-update command. It will replace your composer.phar with the latest version.
$ composer self-update
Or if you want to update to the stable version of Composer, you can use --stable like so. This is the recommended way to update the Composer.
$ composer self-update --stable
In closing
That’s about it. I never knew all these cool features until I stumbled upon them. I hope you learned something new about our beloved Composer. Let me know in the comments which one of all these lesser-known features you liked the most.
Until next time!
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