Summary
Installing CakePHP instantly is the demand of the day in CakePHP developer community and composer can assists us a lot. We can manage multiple versions, plugins, and straight installation without the knowledge of complicated configurations with the help of composer.
Introduction
Generally, composer is consider as a package manager for PHP and good friend of PHP web developers in many ways. Nevertheless, this is not true at technical point of view because composer deals with packages or libraries but it manage them on per project basis, not anything globally. Moreover, it is installing packages in a directory inside your project. Thus, we can say that is truly a dependency manager, not a packages manager though it has inspired by node’s npm and ruby’s bundler (package managers).
In CakePHP development composer is helping us directly where our all CakePHP development projects are depending on the numbers of libraries. The real intricacy is that these libraries are again depending on the other libraries. Therefore, finding the things you depend on from such multiple stack is nothing but searching a needle in a haystack. Fortunately, composer can find out which version of which packages need to be installed ASAP, and it does that immediately for you.
At present, we won’t dive in coding part of composer but we will explore its capacities to manage CakePHP installation beautifully without any hurdle and wastage of time. Yes, it is true that composer can help us to install CakePHP, plugins and other vendor libraries. If we think only about the installation of CakePHP, we can say that we have two kinds of CakePHP developers who need the ultimate help of composer. The first group is consists of new developers who are not much familiar with command line setup and doesn’t know how to configure CakePHP installation righteously. Another group is of advance users who want to use CakePHP within next five minutes to start a project of a big clientele and using latest complicated configuration.
Fortunately, composer can help both groups to do things their own ways. In addition to these, composer solves our highly complicated problems related to multiple version installation. Using PEAR is a bit difficult without its advance knowledge. Therefore, depending on composer is the best idea for many seasoned CakePHP programmers too.
You can use composer along with PEAR packages where installing and managing plugins, vendor libraries, etc. far easier than we think. Let me tell that composer/installers can beautifully handles CakePHP plugins as well as can provide easy access to the robust external libraries of CakePHP.
PHP Development 