Composer

1. Enables you to declare the libraries you depend on.
2. Finds out which versions of which packages need to be installed, and downloads them into your project.
3. Allows you to update all your dependencies with one command.

https://getcomposer.org/doc

Initialize a project for usage with composer

composer init

Install a specific dependency

composer require [vendor]/[package name]

Install dependencies from composer.json

composer install

Update dependencies to their latest versions

composer update

Autoloading

https://getcomposer.org/doc/01-basic-usage.md#autoloading

To refresh the auto-loading information

composer dump-autoload

Example composer.json

{
  "name": "shaack/reboot-cms",
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "shaack",
      "homepage": "https://shaack.com"
    }
  ],
  "repositories": [
    {
      "type": "vcs",
      "url": "https://github.com/shaack/reboot-cms"
    }
  ],
  "version": "2.3.1",
  "description": "A nice flat file CMS. See https://github.com/shaack/reboot-cms",
  "require": {
    "ext-json": "*",
    "ext-fileinfo": "*",
    "ext-dom": "*",
    "erusev/parsedown": "^1.7",
    "symfony/yaml": "^4.1",
    "whitehat101/apr1-md5": "~1.0"
  },
  "autoload": {
    "psr-4": {
      "": "core/src/"
    }
  },
  "keywords": ["cms", "flat file","php", "bootstrap", "markdown"]
}

• "ext-json": "*" is needed to declare standard PHP extensions.
• "autoload" declares project folders to be recognized for autoloading.

Composer and Plesk

On CentOS/RHEL-based distributions

/opt/plesk/php/X.X/bin/php /usr/lib64/plesk-9.0/composer.phar [options] [arguments]

On Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions

/opt/plesk/php/X.X/bin/php /usr/lib/plesk-9.0/composer.phar [options] [arguments]

https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001707605-How-to-run-Composer-with-Plesk-PHP

Run composer in MAMP with a different PHP version

/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php7.4.21/bin/php /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/composer update