Composer Symlinker Plugin
This Composer plugin allows you to install packages as local symbolic links, with the option
to fallback to other install options. This allows you to locally develop a package and its dependencies in parallel., (*1)
This has been discussed as a possible improvement to Composer, but movement has been slow. See Composer issues
#1299, and #4011
for example discussions., (*2)
This is a fork of piwi/composer-symlinker with some enhancements.
Specifically:
- Allow for relative paths (helpful if you develop in a virtual machine, but edit code on your host machine)
- Fall back to other install options, if a package can't be found locally.
- Allow for other installers to give the correct install path. (Useful when using packages that install to non-vendor
locations), (*3)
Setup
First, add the plugin as a dependency in your composer.json:, (*4)
"socialengine/composer-symlinker": "~1.0"
Next, define local paths to your packages in an extra section of your composer.json. You have two options on how to
declare the paths:, (*5)
-
local-dirs: list out directories to look in for packages. When scanning, these paths will be combined with
vendor/package.
-
local-packages: a key-value object, where the key is the package name, and the value is a path to that package. The
paths can be relative to the composer.json.
If you want to restrict which vendors to scan for locally, you can add a local-vendors list., (*6)
If a package is not found locally, the plugin will fall back to other install methods (like packagist/git)., (*7)
"extra": {
"local-dirs": [
"/my/absolute/local/path1",
"../../relative/local/path2"
],
"local-vendors": [
"vendor1",
"vendor2"
],
"local-packages": {
"vendor/package1": "/my/absolute/path/to/vendor/package1",
"vendor/package2": "../relative/path/to/vendor/package2"
}
}
Example Setup
Let's say we want to work on a project named MyProject base on three dependencies:
MyPackage1 and MyPackage2 which are some of our packages, and a third-party
ExternalPackage which is not., (*8)
Further, MyPackage1 is located at /opt/php/MyVendor/MyPackage1 and MyPackage2 can be found at ../my-package-2., (*9)
We can configure our composer.json like so:, (*10)
"require": {
"MyVendor/MyPackage1": "3.6.1",
"MyVendor/MyPackage2": "0.10",
"OtherVendor/ExternalPackage": "2.4.6"
},
"require-dev": {
"socialengine/composer-symlinker": "~1.0"
},
"extra": {
"local-dirs": "/opt/php/",
"local-packages": {
"MyVendor/MyPackage2": "../my-package-2"
}
}
So, when developing on our local box, composer install will install our packages as symlinks to their respective
paths. If use the same composer.json on a box where the paths aren't valid, the packages will be installed
normally., (*11)
Windows users warning
The plugin uses the internal symlink() PHP function.
See Windows restrictions on the manual., (*12)
License
This is released under the MIT License., (*13)
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