nunzion/composer-devlinks

Enables developers to autoload classes from projects outside the vendor directory. These links can replace projects inside the vendor directory and need not to be committed.

0.2.0 2014-05-18 12:52 UTC

Requires

• php: >=5.3.0

MIT

• Henning Dieterichs

• autoload
• Reference
• link
• dev

README

Composer Devlinks automatically alters the file vendor/autoload.php after it is generated by Composer and injects references to custom autoloaders which are defined in a file named composer.links.dev.json. These autoloaders can map classes to different sources, so that effectively referenced packages can be replaced through local ones.

Installation

To add Composer Devlinks to a project, simply add a developer dependency on nunzion/composer-devlinks to your project's composer.json file and add a script element to include the linked autoloaders:

{
    "require-dev": {
        "nunzion/composer-devlinks": "*"
    },
    "scripts": {
        "post-autoload-dump": "Nunzion\\Composer\\DevLinks\\Commands::includeLinkedAutoloaders"
    }
}

Even if composer-devlinks is missing in non-dev installations, composer will not throw any errors when trying to run the script.

Usage

If you want to include your autoloader, you can create a file named composer.links.dev.json in the same directory as the composer.json file:

{
    "links": [
    	"../my-package/vendor/autoload.php"
    ]
}

All links were relative to composer.json, absolute paths can be specified too. If the link does not end with .php, /vendor/autoload.php will be appended automatically.

If the linked autoloader or the file composer.links.dev.json cannot be found, no errors will be thrown.

Example

Lets assume you are developing an application called "me/myapp" which depends on your composer package "me/mylibrary". While programming "me/myapp" you want to improve and extend "me/mylibrary" continuously.

Without Composer Devlinks you have to edit "me/mylibrary" in the vendor directory of your "me/myapp" installation. Apparently this is not a good idea - as soon as there is an update to "me/mylibrary" and you run composer update your changes will eventually be lost.

With Composer Devlinks you can clone both "me/mylibrary" and "me/myapp" into different directories, e.g. test/me-mylibrary and test/me-myapp. Then you can edit the file composer.json in test/me-myapp as explained above. This change to composer.json can be committed into your git repository. In the next step, you can create the file composer.links.dev.json in the directory test/me-myapp to define a developer link to test/me-mylibrary with the following content:

{
    "links": [
    	"../me-mylibrary"
    ]
}

Finally run composer install --dev or composer update for both projects to generate the autoloaders. Now whenever a class of "me/mylibrary" is loaded in test/me-myapp, it will be loaded from test/me-mylibrary.

The file composer.links.dev.json should not be committed as these developer links should be defined only during development.

Author

Henning Dieterichs - [e-mail]

License

Composer Devlinks is licensed under the MIT License.