Set up composer

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. You will need composer for any Symfony based project.

1 Install

Installation procedure should be the same for MacOS and Linux. You can find detailed instructions on https://getcomposer.org/download/.

Use the above instructions to download the composer to your machine.

Next step is making sure version 2 is available globally under composer2 command:

cp composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer2

We also need version 1, as not all projects support version 2 yet:

php composer.phar self-update --1

And now just make sure composer command is available globally:

mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

That is it!

Now you should be able to run composer install for projects using composer1 and composer2 install for projects using composer2

2 Aliases

For easier usage with different PHP versions, we suggest adding some aliases: * MacOS default file: ~/.zshrc * if you are using some custom shell, you will have to find the place for aliases on your own :)

Copy the following into the alias file:

alias composer561="/usr/bin/php5.6 /usr/local/bin/composer1"
alias composer562="/usr/bin/php5.6 /usr/local/bin/composer2"
alias composer701="/usr/bin/php7.0 /usr/local/bin/composer1"
alias composer702="/usr/bin/php7.0 /usr/local/bin/composer2"
alias composer711="/usr/bin/php7.1 /usr/local/bin/composer1"
alias composer712="/usr/bin/php7.1 /usr/local/bin/composer2"
alias composer721="/usr/bin/php7.2 /usr/local/bin/composer1"
alias composer722="/usr/bin/php7.2 /usr/local/bin/composer2"
alias composer731="/usr/bin/php7.3 /usr/local/bin/composer1"
alias composer732="/usr/bin/php7.3 /usr/local/bin/composer2"
alias composer741="/usr/bin/php7.4 /usr/local/bin/composer1"
alias composer742="/usr/bin/php7.4 /usr/local/bin/composer2"
alias composer801="/usr/bin/php8.0 /usr/local/bin/composer1"
alias composer802="/usr/bin/php8.0 /usr/local/bin/composer2"
alias composer811="/usr/bin/php8.1 /usr/local/bin/composer1"
alias composer812="/usr/bin/php8.1 /usr/local/bin/composer2"

3 Manual upgrade/downgrade

If you do not wish to use aliases, but manually upgrade/downgrade composer, you can switch with the following commands:

Switch to version 1:

composer self-update --1

Switch to version 2:

composer self-update --2