Chapter 10: Composer For Dependencies

In this chapter, we are going to look at something that really changed the whole ecosystem in PHP. It was perhaps the most significant development in the history of PHP since the introduction of proper OOP back in PHP 5 days.

That development was the release of Composer and the advent of proper dependency management in PHP.

In this chapter, we're going to start by reviewing exactly what Composer and dependency management are all about.

Then, we are going to make sure we understand what autoloading is and how Composer provides us with a fully-featured autoloader that solves class loading once and for all.

Next, we will get into the real reason for using Composer, which is to acquire third-party packages and libraries so that we can easily bring functionality and features into our application, as provided by high-quality third-party libraries.

Once we've looked at how to bring in dependencies, we are going to go over the...