Composer Installation - Windows/ Linux / Unix / OSX

System Requirements#

Composer requires PHP 5.3.2+ to run. A few sensitive php settings and compile flags are also required, but when using the installer you will be warned about any incompatibilities.

To install packages from sources instead of simple zip archives, you will need git, svn or hg depending on how the package is version-controlled.

Composer is multi-platform and we strive to make it run equally well on Windows, Linux and OSX.

Installation - Linux / Unix / OSX#

Downloading the Composer Executable#

There are in short, two ways to install Composer. Locally as part of your project, or globally as a system wide executable.

Locally#

Installing Composer locally is a matter of just running the installer in your project directory:

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

Note: If the above fails for some reason, you can download the installer with php instead:

php -r "readfile('https://getcomposer.org/installer');" | php

The installer will just check a few PHP settings and then download composer.phar to your working directory. This file is the Composer binary. It is a PHAR (PHP archive), which is an archive format for PHP which can be run on the command line, amongst other things.

You can install Composer to a specific directory by using the --install-dir option and providing a target directory (it can be an absolute or relative path):

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --install-dir=bin

Globally#

You can place this file anywhere you wish. If you put it in your PATH, you can access it globally. On unixy systems you can even make it executable and invoke it without php.

You can run these commands to easily access composer from anywhere on your system:

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Note: If the above fails due to permissions, run the mv line again with sudo.
Note: In OSX Yosemite the /usr directory does not exist by default. If you receive the error "/usr/local/bin/composer: No such file or directory" then you must create /usr/local/bin/ manually before proceeding.

Then, just run composer in order to run Composer instead of php composer.phar.

Installation - Windows#

Using the Installer#

This is the easiest way to get Composer set up on your machine.

Download and run Composer-Setup.exe, it will install the latest Composer version and set up your PATH so that you can just call composer from any directory in your command line.

Note: Close your current terminal. Test usage with a new terminal: That is important since the PATH only gets loaded when the terminal starts.

Manual Installation#

Change to a directory on your PATH and run the install snippet to download composer.phar:

C:\Users\username>cd C:\bin
C:\bin>php -r "readfile('https://getcomposer.org/installer');" | php

Note: If the above fails due to readfile, use the http url or enable php_openssl.dll in php.ini

Create a new composer.bat file alongside composer.phar:

C:\bin>echo @php "%~dp0composer.phar" %*>composer.bat

Add the directory to your PATH environment variable if it isn't already.

Close your current terminal. Test usage with a new terminal:

C:\Users\username>composer -V
Composer version 27d8904

Using Composer#

We will now use Composer to install the dependencies of the project. If you don't have a composer.json file in the current directory please skip to the Basic Usage chapter.

To resolve and download dependencies, run the install command:

php composer.phar install

If you did a global install and do not have the phar in that directory run this instead:

composer install

Following the example above, this will download monolog into the vendor/monolog/monolog directory.

Autoloading#

Besides downloading the library, Composer also prepares an autoload file that's capable of autoloading all of the classes in any of the libraries that it downloads. To use it, just add the following line to your code's bootstrap process:

require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

Woah! Now start using monolog! To keep learning more about Composer, keep reading the "Basic Usage" chapter.