Better approach to download php composer dependencies

Question

I have been using maven in JAVA and started using PHP Maven, recently I switched to composer.

My project is with Zend Framework 2 and the team only checks in the application code not anything on the vendor directory. This is done to avoid conflicts and not to have the libraries under SVN.

Now each time a developer sets his or her new environment, we observe that, the composer pulls the dependencies from internet. This takes quite a long time.

Is there any better idea/approach to make this faster or handling the project in different way to avoid this problem?

maven uses maven proxy servers which can cache the download and can be used in the network again, but do we have any solutions to handle problems like this?

Answer 1

Composer is a very young project, so there might be things missing which e.g. Maven can co without hassle.

You could set up your own Packagist server as described in the composer docs. I believe packagist has some caching options which can be used to store packages on the packagist server.

What you also could do is fork your dependencies and push them to a company-owned private repository. In your composer.json you would now only use this dependencies, making it faster to clone. Of course this would require you to maintain all the different dependencies (although this could be done with a script and a cronjob, pulling the data from the github repo and pushing it into your company owned).

I also believe composer has some proxy options, but I don't think these are meant to cache dependencies.

Last option would be to develop something like this, either as part of composer/packagist or as stand-alone.