mindplay/composer-locator

Locates Composer package root folders by package name

mindplay/composer-locator

⚠️ DEPRECATED: use Composer Runtime Utilities

This Composer plugin provides a means of locating the installation path for a given Composer package name., _(*1)

, _(*2)

Use this to locate vendor package roots, e.g. when working with template files or other assets in a package, locating and discovering plugins, and so on., _(*3)

It works regardless of installers affecting the individual package installation paths, and also works whether the package in question is currently the root package/project or a dependency., _(*4)

Usage

Add to your composer.json file:, _(*5)

{
    "require": {
        "mindplay/composer-locator": "^2"
    },
    "config": {
        "allow-plugins": {
            "mindplay/composer-locator": true
        }
    }
}

Running composer install or composer update will bootstrap your project with a generated class containing a registry of Composer package installation paths., _(*6)

To obtain the installation path for given package:, _(*7)

$path = ComposerLocator::getPath("vendor/package"); // => "/path/to/vendor/package" 

If the specified package name is not found, the function throws a RuntimeException., _(*8)

To check whether a given package is installed:, _(*9)

$is_installed = ComposerLocator::isInstalled("vendor/package"); // => (bool) true|false 

The root Composer project package doesn't necessarily have a package name - to get the root path of the root Composer project, without specifying the package name:, _(*10)

$path = ComposerLocator::getRootPath(); // => "/path/to/project/root" 

You can also get a list of all installed packages via ComposerLocator::getPackages(), or obtain a full key/value map of package-names to absolute root paths via ComposerLocator::getPaths()., _(*11)

Why?

Needing to know the root path of a package installation folder is quite a common requirement, such as when you need to specify paths to template files or other assets., _(*12)

The problem is that Composer itself offers no simple and reliable way to do that., _(*13)

You can use reflection to get the path to a known class or interface from the package, and then dirname() up from your src folder to the package installation root, but that approach isn't very robust, since the location of a class file may change from one version to another., _(*14)

Even if you know the path of the vendor root folder, and the {vendor}/{package} folder name convention, there is no guarantee that's always where packages are installed - something like composer-installers could affect the installation paths., _(*15)

Also, when developing a library, during testing and development, the package will be installed as the root/project package, but this path will be different when it's installed as a dependency in another project., _(*16)