What is composer in laravel?

Question

Sounds weird, but I thought composer was a tool that one used to install packages in PHP stacks. An efficient and robust way to make sure that php environments are setup correctly.

But I keep coming across forum posts that talk about caching and advising to do things like composer clear-cache as if it was part of the actual running application. Like it's actively doing things in the running app.

Am I missing something?

Answer 1

Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will manage (install/update) them for you(refer link.

It helps us installing/updating various requirements/components for our app such as Laravel framework, Doctrine, lodash etc..

Answer 2

If you have ever written anything in PHP before, you have probably found that it feels like you have to keep re-inventing the wheel anytime you want to do a common task such as User Authentication, Database Management or Request Routing.

If you were to start manually picking the bits you wanted from Laravel then it would become very difficult to manage. Each library might also have dependencies, and so you would end up in a mess, particularly if you required other people to work on your project.

This is where Composer comes in. Composer is a dependency manager for PHP. Composer will manage the dependencies you require on a project by project basis. This means that Composer will pull in all the required libraries, dependencies and manage them all in one place.

Answer 3

Managing your dependencies manually in any programing language is an immense pain. This is often why, in most programming languages these days you may notice that all of them have some implementation of a dependency management system or generally a package manager.

In PHP, we use NPM i.e Node Package Manager in frontend technologies like JavaScript, VueJS. For backend, Composer is the de facto dependency manager.

Laravel is itself a package of packages, hence to develop our projects smoothly among the team members, dependency management becomes a must and composer does its work under the hood, silently but efficiently.