silverstripe-framework/docs/en/installation/composer.md

Installing and Upgrading with Composer


Composer is a package management tool for PHP that lets you install and upgrade SilverStripe and its modules. Although installing Composer is one extra step, it will give you much more flexibility than just downloading the file from silverstripe.org. This is our recommended way of downloading SilverStripe and managing your code.

For more information about Composer, visit its website.

Basic usage

Installing composer

To install Composer, run the following command from your command-line.

curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

Or download composer.phar manually.

You can then run Composer commands by calling php composer.phar. For example:

php composer.phar help

Create a new site

Composer can create a new site for you, using the installer as a template. To do so, run this:

php composer.phar create-project silverstripe/installer ./my/website/folder 3.0.2.1

./my/website/folder should be the root directory where your site will live. For example, on OS X, you might use a subdirectory of ~/Sites.

As long as your web server is up and running, this will get all the code that you need. Now visit the site in your web browser, and the installation process will be completed.

Note: The version, 3.0.2.1, is the first version that we've released that has Composer support. Shortly, this will be replaced with 3.0.3. Note that a planned improvement to Composer would make it choose the latest stable version by default; once this has happened, we will update this document.

Adding modules to your project

Composer isn't only used to download SilverStripe CMS: it can also be used to manage all the modules. Installing a module can be done with the following command:

php composer.phar require silverstripe/forum:*

This command has two parts. First is silverstripe/forum. This is the name of the package. You can find other packages with the following command:

php composer.phar search silverstripe

This will return a list of package names of the forum vendor/package. If you prefer, you can search for pacakges on packagist.org.

The second part, *, is a version string. * is a good default: it will give you the latest version that works with the other modules you have installed. Alternatively, you can specificy a specific version, or a constraint such as >=3.0. For more information, read the Composer documentation.

Advanced usage

Manually editing composer.json

To remove dependencies, or if you prefer seeing all your dependencies in a text file, you can edit the composer.json file. It will appear in your project root, and by default, it will look something like this:

{
	"name": "silverstripe/installer",
	"description": "The SilverStripe Framework Installer",
	"require": {
		"php": ">=5.3.2",
		"silverstripe/cms": "3.0.3",
		"silverstripe/framework": "3.0.3",
		"silverstripe-themes/simple": "*"
	},
	"require-dev": {
		"silverstripe/compass": "*",
		"silverstripe/docsviewer": "*"
	},
}

To add modules, you should add more entries into the "require" section. For example, we might add the blog and forum modules. Be careful with the commas at the end of the lines!

Save your file, and then run the following command to refresh the installed packages:

php composer.phar update

Working with project forks and unreleased modules

By default, Composer will install modules listed on the packagist site. There a few reasons that you might not want to do this. For example:

• You may have your own fork of a module, either specific to a project, or because you are working on a pull request
• You may have a module that hasn't been released to the public.

There are many ways that you can address this, but this is one that we recommend, because it minimises the changes you would need to make to switch to an official version in the future.

This is how you do it:

• Ensure that all of your fork repositories have correct composer.json files.

• List all your fork repositories in your project's composer.json files. You do this in a repositories section. Set the type to vcs, and url to the URL of the repository. The result will look something like this:

   {
   	"name": "silverstripe/installer",
   	"description": "The SilverStripe Framework Installer",
  
   	"repositories": [
   		{
   		"type": "vcs",
   		"url": "git@github.com:sminnee/advancedworkflow.git"
   		}
   	],
   	...
   }
  

• Use php composer.phar require to install the module as you would normally. Your fork will be used in place of the package version.

   php composer.phar require silverstipre/advancedworklow
  

Composer will scan all of the repositories you list, collect meta-data about the packages within them, and use them in favour of the packages listed on packagist. To switch back to using the mainline version of the package, just remove your the repositories section from composer.json and run php composer.phar update.

Note: It is important to keep using the same pattern of branch names as the main repositories does. If your version is a fork of 3.0, then call the branch 3.0, not 3.0-myproj or myproj. Otherwise, the depenency resolution gets confused.

For more information, read the "Repositories" chapter of the Composer documentation.

Preparing your project for working on SilverStripe

So you want to contribute to SilverStripe? Fantastic! There are a couple modules that are helpful

• The compass module will regenerate CSS if you update the SCSS files
• The docsviewer module will let you preview changes to the project documentation

By default, these modules aren't installed, but you can install them with a special version of composer's update command:

php composer.phar update --dev

Creating a 'composer' binary

Composer is designed to be portable and not require installation in special locations of your computer. This is useful in certain circumstances, but sometimes it's helpful simply to have composer installed in the path of your workstation.

To do this, we can make the composer download an executable script. Go to a directory in your path that you can write to. I have ~/bin set up for this purpose. You could also go to /usr/bin/ and log in as root.

cd ~/bin

Then download composer.phar to this directory and create a 1 line binary file

curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
mv composer.phar composer
chmod +x composer

Now check that it works:

composer help
composer list

In any of the commands above, you can replace php composer.phar with composer.