Installing local composer packages

This tutorial will guide you on how to install a composer package in one of your other applications, typically used when working locally.

In this scenario my application is called demo/ and example/ is my package.

// Folder Structure
- ~/Sites
  - demo/composer.json
  - example/composer.json

Your composer package

The composer package I created is called josezenem/example, the contents of the file can be found here:

{
    "name": "josezenem/example",
    "type": "library",
    "license": "MIT",
    "autoload": {
        "psr-4": {
            "Josezenem\\Example\\": "src/"
        }
    },
    "authors": [
        {
            "name": "Jose Jimenez"
        }
    ],
    "require": {}
}

Telling demo where to find the package

Next I have a directory called demo/ which holds the application that will import the package.

{
    "name": "josezenem/demo",
    "type": "library",
    "license": "MIT",
    "autoload": {
        "psr-4": {
            "App\\": "app/"
        }
    },
    "authors": [
        {
            "name": "Jose Jimenez"
        }
    ],
    "require": {}
}

The changes we will make is add the required package

"require": {
	"josezenem/example": "dev-main"
}

we will add a "repositories" with the type of "path", and the url which is the path to the example package.

"repositories": [
    {
        "type": "path",
        "url": "../example"
    }
],

It should look like this:

{
    "name": "josezenem/demo",
    "type": "library",
    "license": "MIT",
    "autoload": {
        "psr-4": {
            "App\\": "app/"
        }
    },
    "authors": [
        {
            "name": "Jose Jimenez"
        }
    ],
    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "path",
            "url": "../example"
        }
    ],
    "require": {
        "josezenem/example": "dev-main"
    }
}

Once this is all complete, you can run composer install or composer update josezenem/example which will import your package locally via symlink.