Composer

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

29505 stars · 4828 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Composer is the standard dependency manager for PHP, letting developers declare, resolve, and install project libraries from Packagist and other repositories. It also generates autoloaders, manages version constraints via composer./composer.lock, and supports plugins and scripts.

Use cases

• install php packages for my project
• manage php library versions and lock files
• set up autoloading for php classes
• publish a php package to packagist
• resolve dependency conflicts in a php app
• install private php packages from a custom repository
• update project dependencies safely

When to choose

• you are building any PHP project with external libraries
• you need reproducible dependency installs via a lock file
• you want autoloading (PSR-4) generated for your codebase
• you need to consume or publish packages on Packagist

When to avoid

• you are working in a non-PHP language (use npm, pip, cargo, etc.)
• you need runtime package installation inside production code paths rather than build-time dependency management
• you want a framework or application rather than a build/dependency tool

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

package-manager dependency-audit cli developer-tools developer-tools version-control php cli cross-platform windows packagist dependency-management php-ecosystem autoloading vendor-directory command-line php linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="composer/composer")