How to deploy a php application without running composer at production

Question

I have a Yii 2 web application which uses Composer for its dependencies. How am I supposed to deploy this application at a production server without having to run composer? What I would like to be done is to zip the whole application directory at the development server, copy it to the production server, unzip it and have it deployed there without any action run by composer.

Answer 1

I found the solution. Run:

composer install --prefer-dist --no-dev --optimize-autoloader

at the development system and to then copy the whole directory to the production server.

From the documentation:

--prefer-dist: Reverse of --prefer-source, Composer will install from dist if possible. This can speed up installs substantially on build servers and other use cases where you typically do not run updates of the vendors. It is also a way to circumvent problems with git if you do not have a proper setup.

--no-dev: Skip installing packages listed in require-dev. The autoloader generation skips the autoload-dev rules.

--optimize-autoloader (-o): Convert PSR-0/4 autoloading to classmap to get a faster autoloader. This is recommended especially for production, but can take a bit of time to run so it is currently not done by default.