Dependency management
Dependency management has often been a little rocky, and for new developers who are coming in, adding new frameworks into their projects, setting up their projects, and getting them to run can be daunting. A dependency manager like Composer for PHP solves this issue. It is considered the "glue between all projects", and there is a good reason for that. Composer uses JSON to keep a track of all the dependencies for a given project. Composer's primary job is to download libraries from remote locations and store them locally. To inform Composer as to what libraries we need, we would need to set up the
composer.json
file. This file keeps a track of all the specific libraries, their versions, and the environments that a given library should be deployed to. For example, a unit-testing framework library should never make it to production. There was an instance in an old company where a colleague of mine who was randomly testing our production instance deleted the whole user...