Adding a non-Packagist package to Composer

Adding a single line to our composer.json file and having Composer automatically download and install a package is great, but it requires the package to be available on packagist.org. In this recipe, we'll see how to install packages that aren't available on Packagist.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we'll need a standard Laravel installation.

How to do it...

To complete this recipe, follow these steps:

1. On GitHub, we'll need to find a package we want to use. For this example, we'll use the UniversalForms package found at https://github.com/wesleytodd/Universal-Forms-PHP.

2. Open our main composer.json file and update the require section as follows:

   "require": {
          "laravel/framework": "4.0.*",
          "wesleytodd/universal-forms": "dev-master"
     },

3. In composer.json, under the require section, add the repository we want to use:

   "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "vcs",
            "url": "https://github.com/wesleytodd/Universal-Forms-PHP"
        }
     ],

4. In...