PHP Composer for beginners, an introduction

PHP Composer is in simple language a dependency manager for PHP. Not so simple right? Well let’s break it down a bit more.
A while back web developers using PHP had a challenge when working on projects that required introducing external libraries built by other developers. Say John is working on an event booking application that would need to make use of a geolocation library created by Doe. So John carefully goes through the documentation and is able to successfully integrate the library into the event application. A couple months later, Doe makes major changes to the library that causes John’s application to break. Now John has one of two options — chill and do nothing or go digging into the application again to make necessary updates to make the application work again.
This might seem trivial while working on a small project, but the difficulty this poses doubles as the application starts to scale and requires using more libraries that need to be kept up to date. Then maintenance starts becoming a serious issue.
Fast forward to the good life, Composer to the rescue. Composer was developed by Nils Adermann and Jordi Boggiano to help solve John’s difficulty — managing dependencies and libraries. Composer gives you the flexibility to state the libraries you are using in your project and it will take care of updating them more conveniently.
Composer is also open source and has a lot of community support. To get started is pretty simple and understandable. Head over here to quickly install in your project.
