Use own library using composer

Matej Kuna aka Maťok 24 September 2017

In previous article we built our reusable library, so let's adopt it.

Read related article:
Building reusable library with Composer
How to use composer to build own library? Squeeze maximum from code reusability.

Project preparation

Just to demonstrate basic principles: I will clone Symnofy Standard Edition project

$ git clone https://github.com/symfony/symfony-standard.git
Cloning into 'symfony-standard'...
remote: Counting objects: 6941, done.
Receiving objects:  99% (6872/6941), 1.56 Mremote: Total 6941 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 6940
Receiving objects: 100% (6941/6941), 1.64 MiB | 754.00 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (4005/4005), done.

Require library

Requiring our library is exactly the same as requiring any other library. If I type in project directory composer require matok/bbcode-parser @dev¹ it will probably² end up with error. The reason of error is composer don't find anything named like matok/bbcode-parser. We need a push composer a little bit.

I'm using bitbucket and all I need is provide url to my repository in composer.json.

"repositories": [
    {
        "type": "vcs",
        "url":  "https://Matok2@bitbucket.org/Matok2/bbcode-parser.git"
    }
],

Now composer require matok/bbcode-parser @dev do the job. Common mistake is requiring url name. It doesn't matter what is the url - important is name in composer.json in library project. That's everything. If you go to vendor directory library will be there.

Next time - how to tune up this a little bit.

Removing / Uninstalling library

If you want play with composer maybe you need to remove previously installed library. To remove (uninstall) library use command composer remove matok/bbcode-parser

1: I don't have stable version therefore I must declare @dev
2: sooner or later exactly this library will be free to use and you don't end up with error