
Composer is a best dependency manager for PHP. Composer can install, update and pull in all the required PHP packages to your project directory. At the time of installing package, composer will check for dependencies of package and if dependent package are there then it will also install dependencies. In this tutorial, we have described how to install and use Composer on Debian 10 Buster.
Prerequisites
Before you start to install Composer, You should logged in as non-root user account with sudo privileges. As well as PHP installed on you Debian 10 system.
Installing PHP Composer
Follow the below steps to install Composer on your Debian 10 Buster:
At first, you have to update the packages index and install some of dependencies by following commands:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install curl php-cli php-mbstring git unzip
Now execute the below command to download the composer installer file:
php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
File composer-setup.php
will be downloaded to current working directory.
After that, check the data integrity of the script by comparing the script SHA-384 hash on the Composer Signatures page.
Here, we are going to use wget command to download the signature of the latest Composer installer and will store it in HASH
variable as given below:
HASH="$(wget -q -O - https://composer.github.io/installer.sig)"
Now issue the below command to check that the installation script is not corrupted:
php -r "if (hash_file('SHA384', 'composer-setup.php') === '$HASH') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"
You will get following output if the hashes match:
Installer verified
If the hashes don’t match you will see output like Installer corrupt
. If this is case you have to download composer installation script again and check hash value until you get Installer Verified output.
Next, issue the following command to install Composer globally inside /usr/local/bin
directory:
sudo php composer-setup.php --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer
It will show you output as below:
All settings correct for using Composer Downloading... Composer (version 1.9.0) successfully installed to: /usr/local/bin/composer Use it: php /usr/local/bin/composer
That’s it. Composer
is installed as a system-wide and it will be available for all users.
At last, you can verify the installation by typing:
composer
The above command will print details as following:
______
/ ____/___ ____ ___ ____ ____ ________ _____
/ / / __ \/ __ `__ \/ __ \/ __ \/ ___/ _ \/ ___/
/ /___/ /_/ / / / / / / /_/ / /_/ (__ ) __/ /
\____/\____/_/ /_/ /_/ .___/\____/____/\___/_/
/_/
Composer version 1.9.0 2019-08-02 14:12:47
Usage:
command [options] [arguments]
Use Composer in PHP Project
Now the Composer is installed globally on your Debian 10 system and we will show how to use in your php project.
First of all, you have to create a directory which should project root directory. Create directory my-project as a root directory of your project.
sudo mkdir my-project
cd my-project
The next step is to initialize a new composer.json
using the composer require command and specify the package we want to download.
In this example, we will create a sample application to print the current time using carbon package.
Execute the below command to initialize a new composer.json
and install the carbon package:
composer require nesbot/carbon
After complete the installation you can see that Composer created two files composer.json
and composer.lock
, and a vendor
directory.
ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1 tecnstuff users 59 Aug 11 00:50 composer.json -rw-r--r-- 1 tecnstuff users 6820 Aug 11 00:50 composer.lock drwxr-xr-x 4 tecnstuff users 4096 Aug 11 00:50 vendor
- The
vendor
directory contains project dependencies. - The
composer.lock
contains a list of all installed packages including the version of the packages. - The
composer.json
describes the PHP project and all PHP dependencies.
Now, you have installed carbon package, create a new file named test.php
and paste the following code inside the file. It will prints the current time.
<?php
require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
use Carbon\Carbon;
printf("Now: %s", Carbon::now());
Run above script by typing:
php test.php
The output should look like this:
Now: 2019-08-11 11:27:12
After that, if you want to update the package then you can use following command:
composer update
Conclusion
You have successfully learned how to install Composer on your Debian 10 Buster. We have also described you how to use Composer to create a simple PHP project. You can get more information about Composer visit the official Composer documentation page.
If you have any question or suggestion please leave comment below.
Why do you recommend downloading the Composer installer and using it to install composer, instead of just installing composer through APT?