Composer dump-autoload, issue

Question

While Working on a project using Laravel 4 to be precise, I decided that i wanted to make my own helper file to house my custom functions.. one of which is this below...

function pr($ar=array(), $bool=false){

   echo '<pre>';
   print_r($ar);
   echo '</pre>';

   if($bool){
      exit;
   }

}

in my composer.json file, just after the autoload: classmap , i added myne, autoload:files -arrar and included my custom file, app/helpers as illustrated below..

            "app/database/migrations",
            "app/database/seeds",
            "app/tests/TestCase.php"
        ],

        "others":[
            "app/helpers.php"
        ]

and i switched to my terminal window and ran the following commands

composer dump-autoload -o  

but i still got errors that my pr() function was undefined... then i tried the artisan alternative... [-o ] to optimize the files

php artisan dump-autoload

but still it refused to work... and then i changed the array name from

"others":[
            "app/helpers.php"
        ]

to

"files":[
            "app/helpers.php"
        ]

then i got the desired response, my code could now see the custom function i wrote, please i'd like to know if there is a pattern i was supposed to follow or otherwise, in my case, i mistook " files ", for " others " and i got errors, but incase, what did i miss here, all i see is just a name-string value for the array representation....

Answer 1

This is how composer works. In autoload section you need to use files when you want to load some files. In my Laravel 5 project I have for example:

"autoload": {
    "classmap": [
        "database",
        "tests/TestCase.php"
    ],
    "psr-4": {
        "App\\": "app/",
        "verify\\": "verify/"
    },
    "files": [
        "app/Helpers/functions.php"
    ]
},

If you look at documentation you will see that you need to use files to load any extra files by autoloader.