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 commands from your command-line.

# Download composer.phar
curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

# Move to your path
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/bin/composer

Or download composer.phar manually, and rename composer.phar as composer, and put it in your path. On Windows, you should call the file composer.bat.

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

composer help

It is also possible to keep `composer.phar` out of your path, for example, to put it in your project root. Every command would then start with `php composer.phar` instead of `composer`. This is handy if need to keep your installation isolated from the rest of your computer's set-up, but we recommend putting composer into the path for most people.

Create a new site

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

composer 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 SilverStripe modules. Installing a module can be done with the following command:

composer 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:

composer 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 after the colon, *, 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.

`master` is not a legal version string - it's a branch name. These are different things. The version string that would get you the branch is `dev-master`. The version string that would get you a numeric branch is a little different. The version string for the `3.0` branch is `3.0.x-dev`. But, frankly, maybe you should just use `*`.

Updating dependencies

Except for the control code of the Voyager space probe, every piece of code in the universe gets updated from time to time. SilverStripe modules are no exception.

To get the latest updates of the modules in your project, run this command:

composer update

Updates to the required modules will be installed, and the composer.lock file will get updated with the specific commits of each of those.

Deploying projects with Composer

When deploying projects with composer, you could just push the code and run composer update. However, this is risky. In particular, if you were referencing development dependencies and a change was made between your testing and your depoyment to production, you would end up deploying untested code. Not cool!

The composer.lock file helps with this. It references the specific commits that have been checked out, rather than the version string. You can run composer install to install dependencies from this rather than composer.json.

So, your deployment process, as it relates to Composer, should be as follows:

• Run composer update on your development version before you start whatever testing you have planned. Perform all the necessary testing.

• Check composer.lock into your repository.

• Deploy your project code base, using the deployment tool of your choice.

• Run the following command on your production version.

  composer install

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": "3.0.2.1",
		"silverstripe/framework": "3.0.2.1",
		"silverstripe-themes/simple": "*"
	},
	"require-dev": {
		"silverstripe/compass": "*",
		"silverstripe/docsviewer": "*"
	},
	"minimum-stability": "dev"
}

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:

composer 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. Set up the project forks as you would a distributed package. If you have cloned a repository that already has a composer.json file, then there's nothing you need to do, but if not, you will need to create one yourself.

• 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"
   		}
   	],
   	...
   }
  

• Install the module as you would normally. Use the regular composer function - there are no special flags to use a fork. Your fork will be used in place of the package version.

   composer require silverstripe/advancedworkflow
  

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 composer update.

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

Forks and branch names

Generally, you should 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.

Sometimes, however, this isn't feasible. For example, you might have a number of project forks stored in a single repository, such as your personal github fork of a project. Or you might be testing/developing a feature branch. Or it might just be confusing to other team members to call the branch of your modified version 3.0.

In this case, you need to use Composer's aliasing feature to specify how you want the project branch to be treated, when it comes to dependency resolution.

Open composer.json, and find the module's require. Then put as (core version name) on the end.

{
	...
	"require": {
		"php": ">=5.3.2",
		"silverstripe/cms": "3.0.2.1",
		"silverstripe/framework": "dev-myproj as 3.0.x-dev",
		"silverstripe-themes/simple": "*"
	},
	...
}

What this means is that when the myproj branch is checked out into a project, this will satisfy any dependencies that 3.0.x-dev would meet. So, if another module has "silverstripe/framework": ">=3.0.0" in its dependency list, it won't get a conflict.

Both the version and the alias are specified as Composer versions, not branch names. For the relationship between branch/tag names and Composer vesrions, read the relevant Composer documentation.

This is not the only way to set things up in Composer. For more information on this topic, read the "Aliases" chapter of the Composer documentation.

Setting up an environment for contributing to SilverStripe

So you want to contribute to SilverStripe? Fantastic! You have to initialize your project from the latest development branch, rather than a release tag. The process will take a bit longer, since all modules are checked out as full git repositories which you can work on.

composer create-project silverstripe/installer --dev ./my/website/folder 3.0.x-dev

The --dev flag will add a couple modules which are useful for SilverStripe development:

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

Note that you can also include those into an existing project by running composer update --dev.